the pool has to come down

The swimming pool was a gift from my grandparents the year that Mom was diagnosed with cancer. I'm guessing that the two facts were related, but I was only eight at the time and wasn't specifically told, and I haven't asked since to verify. But I remember a lot specifically about the installation of the pool.

First, we went to see the model at Branch Brook. Mom and Dad measured out the backyard with sticks and string. Then the guys with machines (I'm a girl and don't know what they're called) came to dig a hole in the backyard. The guy operating the machine nicked the shed and tore off a half a shingle and gouged a gash in the wood. We had a really wet backyard, and the dirt hole they tore up soon turned into a mudpit.

This must have been late June, because Mommy had just had her surgery, still had drains, and was generally white-faced. The weather turned rainy, and the pre-pool mudhole turned into a lake. We four kids were going to VBS. The morning that the pool installers were coming, the five of us were outside with buckets bailing the water out of the hole. Our carpool came to pick us kids up, and I remember desperately wanting to stay at home to help Mom work in the mudhole. For one reason or another, I got in the van and went off to Pinecone Campground for another day of playing. I remember thinking how utterly ridiculous it was that four healthy kids were going off to play while Mom, with her incisions and drains and obvious pain, was in the backyard bailing water out of a mudpit so that guys could come install a pool for her kids to swim in. When we came home that evening, the pool was installed. Mom never said a word about how difficult it must have been for her. She was as excited as any of us at how nicely the water was filling the pool. She wasn't going in any time soon. She was going on chemo and would spend the majority of the next year on the couch sick.

I think of that day often. I wish, I wish, I wish that I had stayed home from VBS, had helped her work, had spent just one more afternoon with her. I didn't even like VBS, and I think that was the day that a little boy knocked over my can of soda, leaving me with nothing to drink. What a stupid thing for her to put herself out for, and she did it without a single complaint.

Now the pool is broken and needs to be taken down. And I want to mourn over the removal of a monument. In a way, the pool feels sacred. I can still stand out there and look over my shoulder at the pool and see her crouching in a mud pit, slinging water out of a bucket the way she was fifteen years ago as I left her behind.