Ten-Finger Exercises

Summer yesterdays

Bill got the pool up and running today. It’s just a little above-ground pool, but it will feel great if the weather ever acts like summer. I’m reluctant to put out a call for the summer to shape up, because it might do so in leaps and bounds. Still, this will be my first summer with some time off during the weekdays (if I don’t change jobs) to do the most positively indolent delightful thing I know: to float around the pool on a raft, wearing a baseball cap to keep the sun out of my eyes, and reading a novel.

It was better with an in-ground pool, but wasn’t everything? A lap around took quite awhile, as the corners of the air mattress would sometimes hang up for awhile near the ladder and then shoot on down the length of the pool when the jets hit it. I would leave a can of Diet Coke near the steps, and languidly paddle my way over for a sip now and then, or to answer the phone. Ah, such luxury!

This pool is a climb to get into and makes a small circuit around, but the birds in that huge Ponderosa pine are wonderful to watch. There must be five families at least. Sometimes the hawks circle slowly, way above; and hummingbirds at dusk flit from the feeders to the red trumpet vine, warning each other off their particular territory of the moment. It is a beautiful back yard.

Bill is listening to Jesus Christ Superstar as he works on the other computer. The music is energizing, but I’m glad it’s in the other room. He likes things much louder than I do. I’d probably never turn on music or the tv, and yet I do enjoy both when he does.

When I think about swimming, I think of the lake cottage in Oden, Michigan, on Crooked Lake. My great-grandfather Cantwell and a friend of his bought property there before anyone else did, probably around the turn of the 20th century. They built identical houses with rooflines that looked like barns. My great grandfather was an attorney in Indiana, and at one time was the speaker of the house in the Indiana legislature. He had an Indian horse blanket that had draped his desk hung on the wall. I wish I knew where it was now, and what the history of it was.

My grandmother, Nana, came there as a bride. Trying to help with the housework, she took a bucket of water and poured it on the upstairs floor to wet mop the floor. The water ran down between the planks and into the living room. Her new mother-in-law was a fear-inspiring figure, the way she told it.

The ‘cabin’ was two stories high and had open beams upstairs that held an assortment of things like a finished attic would. But these stared you in the face when you lay on your back in the dark and wondered if maybe they’d fall down. The iron bedsteads are what I remember most. There was already one in each room, with its white china chamber pot tucked beneath. I don’t know why there were extras, but there they were.

The house had a bathroom indoors, unlike the lake cottage of Mother’s family, and it had a bathtub. The water had to be heated on the oil stove, or the wood stove if it was going, in big teakettles with marbles in the bottom to keep the lime from forming. I don’t think that worked.

The most unusual thing about the house was the water system. There was an artesian well. The kitchen sink had a pump in it, but the back porch had the water running freely all the time from a laboratory shaped faucet. It ran into a metal box and then into a wooden cupboard with metal shelves, four of them. That was the refrigerator. If you wanted to keep your butter and eggs cold, you put them in a contained and either put it in the cold water or on top of a stone in the water. If you had fresh fish, then you kept them outside in a “live box,” a box built of cement and stone about 3x5’ and two feet high. It had the same icy water circulating in it. I don’t know where the water drained out to, but the fish kept swimming there until they were ready to be called to dinner. :>}