Now I’ll finally have room for a compost bin

Every summer at least one of the local news stations will air a horrible story about a child drowning in a swimming pool. It always amazes me how some of the parents of these children can stand in front of a camera with swollen, tear-stained faces and admit they screwed up. “We only took our eyes off her for a second,” they say. I never really understood how turning your head for just a moment could mean the end of your child’s life. At least I never understood until now.

Autumn has been walking for a year and a half now. As of Memorial Day weekend she knows how to work the sliding screen door the leads to our deck. Those two skills, when combined, could mean disaster for our little family if Nathan and I forget to lock the door. Autumn loves the water. She loves to swim and on more than one occasion last year she pounded on the screen door as she lustily eyed the sparkling blue water below. “Zoom! Zoom!” (”Swim! Swim!”) she’d say.

When I’d bring the issue of the pool’s inherent danger up to Nathan, he’d dismiss my concerns by saying Autumn could run into death anywhere. He loved the pool. The pool was one of the reasons he wanted to buy the house and he didn’t exactly see the threat in it that I did. “Autumn could walk out the front door and get hit by a car,” he’d say. As true as that is, the swimming pool seemed to be more of a lure to our daughter than the street, although she still seems to be irritatingly drawn to that as well.

Last summer was the clincher though. It was a horrible year for our pool. Our equipment kept breaking, we had, what seemed, a perpetual problem with algae and our chemical costs were through the roof. The algae problem kept us out of the pool most of the time and by the end of the season Nathan had finally had enough. When we slipped the winter cover on in October, we did it knowing we would not be swimming in this pool again.

As luck would have it, Nathan’s dad has a friend who’s in the market for a swimming pool. We talked about the prospect of this friend taking the pool off our hands last year, but our conversations usually ended up with my father-in-law saying, “I’ll talk to Martin and see what he wants to do,” leaving Nathan and me wondering if we were going to have to find some other means of disposing of the thing.

Well, it turns out Martin is ready for the pool. He and my father-in-law stopped by the house yesterday afternoon to take some measurements and assess how they’ll be able to remove the pool from our yard. The plan right now is for them to tear it out the last weekend in June and I couldn’t be happier.

The really great thing about this deal is that Martin will be providing fill dirt for the hole that will be left after the pool is removed. He and my father-in-law are recruiting their drinking buddies to assist in the tear-down and will be hauling away the wood from the deck as well. At least that’s my understanding from what Nathan told me yesterday.

Being lazy people, Nathan and I are thrilled with the prospect of not having to take on this project by ourselves. Of course it will take a couple of years to get our yard in shape. Our deck was built around the pool, and with the pool gone we’ll have a deck that surrounds pretty much nothing. Next year we might be able to afford a completely new deck, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Still, I’m so excited to get rid of the thing. No more high electric bills, chemical costs and listening to my husband grumble about maintenance. Now if we could only be rid of the screaming kids living behind us it might truly be a peaceful summer.