Lazy days by the pool are the greatest. Is there a better way to invite peace? Or incite peace? To conjure it and accept it’s presence, like the breeze you’ve been praying for since last summer, that finally arrived without notice?
I wonder if this was the place where I first found peace as a child. Sitting near the pool’s edge, watching the alternating lane flags waiver overhead, wondering without pretension how old the pine trees here are, hoping they’re over 100, but having no real sense of such things.
As a child, there were two pools that could incite such bliss: one in the backyard of my childhood home and another nestled on a property in the Catskills, shared by a pile of Ukrainians, all of whom my grandparents felt related to through one “small village acquaintance” or another.
At home, we played in the pool for hours, my little sister and me, taking breaks only to eat or pee, eating buttery popcorn and canned black olives as a snack, because she knew how to work the microwave and I the can opener. We played Marco Polo and games called Toothpaste and TV Guide, any of which I could probably recall the rules to and recreate if anyone wanted me to, none of which I think adults actually like to play past the age of 14.
Peace ensued in this place where time did not exist. We played for hours without a concept of time, nor a need to be anywhere. We learned of the time only when our mother called to us words like, “dinner,” or “ice pops.” These, we knew, would be the homemade kind, frozen Crystal Light or Minute Made Citrus Punch, the only juices we ever enjoyed, for reasons I couldn’t say.
And peace lived in the Catskills, at the resort near our grandparents house, where we enjoyed summer camp and live music dances and Ukrainian food and Slush Puppies the color of Kool Aide and the chatter of the elderly in a language we didn’t speak but seemed to recognize well enough to get by. My little sister and I swam at the pool, built into the side of a hill, offering a view we were too young to appreciate, caring about nothing in the world except who made the biggest cannon ball and how to escape the weird kid who kept swimming near us, who was perfectly friendly but inexplicably odd, with his waggle tooth and short shorts that made him look not quite of this nation.
Yet there was peace. All around. Ever present. Always. In every moment. A calm knowing that the day would be perfect. That we would swim until exhaustion. That our fair skin would likely burn, just under the eyes, igniting our freckles and challenging our pain threshold.
“Just three more minutes,” we’d beg past the pain. Because we’d found peace and refused to let it go.
Today, the pool brings the same comforts. The gentle rhythms and sounds that quiet the mind long enough to feel good no matter what happens there. We find peace at the pool and gratitude right along with it.
What brought you peace this week? Share the peace!
4 the Love of Peace 