Goodbye pool :-(

Sadly, after about twenty six years of having a swimming pool, we are taking it down and giving it away to a friend of our son's. It was getting too much to take care of and no one else had the time or interest to help clean it. It takes a lot of work to manage the chemicals so it doesn't "go green" and look like the swamp monster lives in it. And another thing was that no one used it. We would get it all cleaned out and running and we had to run it daily and put chemicals in daily. Last year I think Jon and I used it twice, at most. No one else had the time or desire to. So, it's coming down, and will be a lot of work to take it down, fill in the huge hole and grow grass there, put additional railing on the lower deck. But once that is done, no more work except cutting some extra grass.

We got the pool in 1983 when the kids were all little and we lived in a different town at the time. They all learned to swim in this pool. I remember when our middle son wanted to just stand on the stairs with a mask on and didn't want to get splashed. He would just block the ladder and scream and yell if he got the slightest bit wet...except for his feet which were in the water. Eventually, he became the crazy one to jump in and do all kinds of stunts.

We literally lived in the pool all summer, all of us getting nice and tanned from the sun's rays. When we moved to this town, we took the pool down, brought it here and dug a hole and went through the ordeal of setting it up. Only at this house, instead of flat across, we dug it out to nearly six feet in the middle and got an expandable liner. The kids loved jumping into it and doing all kinds of tricks. Jon would jump in, too in those days. I think now if he jumped into it all the water would come out or the sides would collapse! Shhhhh...don't tell him I said that!

I will miss the pool, but we are getting older and have to just admit and accept there are things we just can't or don't want to do anymore. We will just buy a membership at the Y or alumni membership at the university I went to. We can still enjoy swimming, but leave the maintenance to someone else.