This is what I see out my bedroom window on a lovely summer day. The season and the pool are only in action for two months (July - September) but they keep busy. They also are noisy, screaming and splashing until it gets too dark to stay in the pool. But they are having a good time and that's what counts.
This year, the accursed 2020, made this impossible. By June the pandemic had hit hard and most public or domestic swimming pools, gyms, and restaurants were closed. My apartment management had already started to renovate the pool, so they just never opened the pool and kept on renovating. This renovation was noisier than the kids had ever been, as the workmen chipped off the entire inner concrete surface with tiny jackhammers no larger than a vacuum cleaner. In my dim opinion this may have been a scheme to keep the workmen on site earning money rather than being unemployed.
Their chip work filled my apartment with coarse white dust, which I am now attempting to clean off from the surfaces inside here. They finished their job in September so even though the pool was ready it was too cold and too plague-risky to open. So they filled the renovated pool with water and installed a tightly fastened plastic tarp over the whole area of the pool, to keep leaves and debris out. Why didn't they do that in other years past? A profound philosophical question left unanswered.
You can wake up now.
Brown ink and colored pencils, 6" x 5", May 25, 1998.
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