Two days ago we woke up to palm trees. Yesterday and today Jon left for his morning walk with layers of clothing between his long-johns and his parka, the Fahrenheit thermometer whining nineteen degrees. Or perhaps the whining was coming from us. It’s always a pleasure to come back to our comfortable home, after being away somewhere—but the weather on this one is a tough adjustment. We spent Christmas afternoon in a pool, for crying out loud, and now… Sigh.

It was the pool that sent me down memory lane, thinking about my grandmother’s pool when I was a kid. Every summer my mom would take my sister and me (our dad had to stay behind and work, poor fellow) to Colorado to stay with her parents. My grandparents belonged to a club with a huge pool, and our summer days were structured around our pool-time. In the mornings we took swimming lessons, progressing through the levels summer by summer as our competence grew.

There was a poolside snack shack where we ordered lunch every day. I don’t remember the “main course” (corndogs?), but I remember the Cheetohs, because our fingers would be so water-wrinkled that it was hard to clean the Cheetoh-orange off of them. The “beverage” of choice was something purple-and-crushed-ice, essentially a sno-cone in a cup, though I can’t remember what we called it.

The afternoon was purely play, and we would stay in the water till our mother called us out on our blue lips and chattering teeth. Then we would lie down on the warm cement, and she would spread a towel over each of us, and we would warm up like lizards on a hot rock.

Most afternoons a thunderstorm would come down off the Rockies, so we would have to get out of the pool and go home, hang our swimsuits on the kid-high clothesline Grandma had strung for us, and get into actual clothes for the first time all day, at four in the afternoon.

We did do other things in those summers—we sewed with Grandma, we batted baseballs with Grandpa, and a highlight of each summer was the visit to Elitch’s amusement park in Denver. We visited the enormous Boulder library with its statue of Eeyore standing on his head looking for his tail, and checked out as many books as Grandma’s library card would allow. But those summers were really all about the pool.

Having spent my childhood summers pretty much living in a swimsuit, it’s small wonder I’m a fiend for getting into the water when I get to to Hawai’i! Swimsuit-top and bare feet—that feels like my natural state. (But—sadly—not in nineteen degree weather.)