Chalk art

My summer days, at least the weekdays, are pretty much the same as any day any time of the year. I start work, either in the office or at home, at about 7:40 AM. I finish work a few minutes after 4, and then I shut down my desk, or I drive home. But summer evenings are very different from evenings any other time of the year. On every other evening, I do kind of boring adult stuff - housework, laundry, errands, gym, volunteer work, etc. It usually feels like a second workday - no big deal since my workdays are not too hard and I like doing stuff, but I do always feel like I have to keep to a schedule and that I can’t, or at least shouldn’t rest until I have fulfilled all of my responsibilities. An occasional dinner out on a Tuesday or Wednesday or an occasional weeknight Capitals game are nice breaks in the routine, but other than those little breaks, I do pretty much stick to the routine. 

Summer evenings, however, are quite different. I still run errands and clean stuff and cook stuff (though not as much of the cooking) but the late sunset makes the evening feel free and unhurried, like I don’t have to race the daylight. The pool remains open until 8:45 PM so I go swimming at 7:30 or 8. The water is often cold at that time of day, but it doesn’t matter. Cold or warm or anywhere in between, swimming is freedom.  

And summer weekends are just brand new, now that I am no longer a summer swim parent. Two wide-open days - I hardly know what to do with myself, really. 

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On the 10th and last of a streak of cloudless rainless hot sunny days, I came home from work and did some routine household chores, and then I went swimming. 

When you arrive at our neighborhood pool, you check in at a desk in the breezeway of a small mid-century pool building that has locker rooms and a guards’ office on one side of the breezeway and the snack bar on the other. A concrete walkway continues past the building and through the grassy grounds down to the pool deck. I stepped carefully as I walked down that walkway, to avoid stepping on and spoiling the gallery of chalk art flowers and dolphins. The flowers and dolphins are the work of young swim team members, who decorate the pool on Friday nights to welcome visiting teams on Saturday morning. The drawings remained bright and clear on the concrete after five days. 

I swam for a bit, and then watched the second annual neighborhood cornhole tournament, in which my son and one of his best friends repeated as champions. The other boy’s mother and I were pretty invested in their victory. Once a sports mom, always a sports mom, I guess. The tournament was over before 8, so I got back in the water to swim some more. Getting in and out and back into the water is something I do only when it’s really hot. It was a rather perfect summer evening. Then the heat finally broke a bit, with a late evening rain and thunderstorm that lasted into the night. The rain refreshed the real flowers, but it washed the chalk flowers away.

*****

It’s sunny again today, and the grass in our neighborhood looks green again. It hadn’t turned brown yet but it was starting to look a little pale and colorless. We’re in what I think of as the middle phase of summer. Early summer lasts from Memorial Day until the beginning of meteorological summer, which started last week. I guess you could call those weeks pre-summer, especially if you still have children in public school. Now it’s fully summer, schools are closed, and the summer swim season is well underway. The water is warm now. Last weekend it was close to too warm but it cooled a bit after one cool night, and it will be cooler still today after last night’s thunderstorm. I’m swimming almost every day. 

*****

I’ve been trying to build my endurance and increase my swim distances, and I’m back up to 800 meters in the pool, pretty much without stopping. That’s just about half a mile. I’m slow but I have never cared about my times, and I’m not about to start now. One night, when I was maybe two laps in, a 17-year-old boy took the lane next to me. He had missed swim practice and was doing the team’s set on his own. He lapped me consistently, as well he should because he’s a 17-year-old competitive swimmer and I’m a middle-aged lady if we’re being really optimistic about my potential lifespan. I mean, I’m not going to live to 118, God willing. But even though this disrespectful young whippersnapper easily doubled me in pool lengths, he got out of the pool before I did. So I outlasted him on both ends of that set. And that means I won. 

*****

Every year, I have the same conversation, usually with multiple people. Sometimes I start this conversation, and sometimes someone else initiates, but the upshot is the same: Summer is great and everything but the moment July 4th comes, it feels like it’s winding down, no matter what the calendar says. 

Just a few days before July 4, I had this conversation for the first time this summer. I don’t remember who started it, but people kept entering the chat, as they say on the internet. One person said that on July 5, we’d start to see back-to-school advertising. Another person complained that the stores would be stocked with Halloween candy and decorations by mid-August. I said that July 4 felt like the first stop on a freight train to Labor Day; and that once Labor Day was over, it felt like there would be no further stops until Christmas. The very next day, I received an email notification that preorders were being accepted for the University’s annual holiday ornament. The train’s not even stopping at Labor Day anymore. All aboard. See you in December.

*****

As much as I love summer, it’s too hot these last two days even for me. Very hot, and so densely humid that I just don’t understand how the air is even holding all that water. But it is; it’s just holding on to it and not letting it go. Days that in other summers would almost certainly end in Old Testament thunderstorms just continue sunny and bright until almost 9 PM. 

I’m lucky, of course. I work indoors in an air-conditioned office and I drive my air-conditioned car home to my air-conditioned house. And then I walk around the corner to the pool and I swim until my eyes burn and my fingers are pruny and the chlorine permeates my skin. 

It’s so hot that everyone is getting in the pool now. People who normally sit on the deck reading their books are now in the water up to their necks. People who normally swim laps are just splashing around, floating, treading water. On the day after my 800-meter swim, my shoulders hurt and so the next day, I swam like a child, flitting back and forth in the water, floating on my back, swimming in zig zags and circles and straight lines through one of the shallow “wings” of the pool. I didn’t do any headstands or somersaults, but I could have. 

*****

It’s now about 10 days since that first thunderstorm. Other than a 30-minute shower late in the day on July 4, there’s been no rain; just blazing heat and intense humidity. My husband is out watering the tomatoes. He’d water the grass if I let him but I won’t. The forecast for the next few days is pretty much the same as it could be for any day in July in the DMV - hot, humid, chance of late-day showers and thunderstorms. Meteorologists here could pretty much take the month off, post that forecast on repeat every day, and they’d be right eight times out of ten. The swim team has its last home meet this week, so the chalk art will be back, at least for a little while.