Starships

Let's go to the beach, each
Let's go get away
They say, what they gonna say?


My paternal grandparents lived on North Long Lake in my hometown. Every April, as soon as the ice would thaw on their bay ... my two older cousins and I would die waiting for it to be warm enough to swim. I'm pretty sure our first submersion into North Long was in May, if not April, each spring. We couldn't wait. We couldn't feel our toes, or stop chattering our teeth, but there was something magical about that lake and summers spent on the peeling, redwood dock, drinking canned Shasta and eating panfried Sunnies Grandpa helped us catch with cane poles. So each April and May, my nostalgia points toward that beloved, sandy-bottomed lake and I crave the scent of suntan oil and outboard motor gas and beach bonfires and a pile of clean, scratchy Joe Camel swim towels stacked neatly in the boathouse. 


My daughter inherited a lot of things from me- her love and need of bodies of water being one. It's delightful. So it comes as no surprise that as soon as the Robins showed up and the sun stretched into 6pm, and 7pm ... making it bright at 8pm, she assumed summer was here to stay and started wearing her bathing suit on the daily. Fill up my pool! she would chant as I poured coffee, bleary-eyed, at dawn, Fill up my pool! she would chant as I tucked her in at dusk. 


Her pool, the cheap, plastic ribbed-bottomed kind from KMart is still stowed in the shed. The fill up my pool! chant is still omnipresent. So what would any logical four-year-old do but use what resources she had to make her own pool? Filling up Daddy's retro snow sled with freezing cold hose water? In early May?


Yes, baby girl. I know exactly why you couldn't wait.
Exactly.