For a Season

I have a love-hate relationship with the municipal pool next to the city fitness center where I walk on the treadmill. Now, in the summer, it's brimful of life, color and noise. Whether there are only a half-dozen kids or forty, it feels crammed end-to-end with people, mostly kids, enjoying one of summer's greatest pleasures.

It's only open about eight weeks a year, though, and so the rest of the time it's empty and flat, covered up in winter months with a gray tarp that's all the more dull when compared with the brief season of vitality. 

But it's open now, so may it bloom and bloom and bloom.