Little Brick Houses for You and Me: August Reverie

It's already August which sure feels crazy. Although August is still definitely summer I sometimes think if it as fall because many fall oriented things in my life used to begin in august. The main one, of course, was school and also, in my teen years, high school sports. Girls basketball was played in the fall in my day in this state and I will never forget the heat of those old gyms and locker rooms on the Class B circuit. Air conditioning was not in the budget when those place were built. A few blocks away the football team was enjoying their own form of torture in the hot sun. I don't know which would have been worse...stuffy humid gym or hot sun. Either way, when the second or third week of August rolls around and a former player notices a certain date on the calendar (usually the 10th, 12th, something like that) they can't help but travelling back in their memories to those days. I think we can all say that we kind of miss them although we also don't want to repeat them!

In addition to school and sports, August was usually when wheat harvest was happening and also most of my friends (seriously) had birthdays in August. There was one week where two friends had birthdays on the 16th, one was on the 17th, one was on the 18th and one, my BFF, was on the 20th! Then another was on the 24th. I pretty much lived out of a suitcase and spent the whole week sleeping in my friends' tents, campers and basements after days at the water park, bowling alley or movie theater. It was certainly fun and busy.

These years, my August days are pretty monotonous and it has been so hot and humid. Mostly humid...every time we are outside I fantasize about the year that will come when I can actually take all the kids to the pool and not have to be hovering and watching them all so I can enjoy the pool too. I also want to take an icy plunge into the pool of my youth which was nothing fancy compared to the jungle gym and climbing wall filled facilities that are everywhere in our city now. The city pools here will be closing in about a week and it was the same when I worked in Fargo. Apparently they can't keep them staffed after sports practices start although we had that same routine when I was a teen and no one seemed to care at all that we had practice in the morning before work. We just filled up our huge water bottles and headed into the sun. Our pool was open until school started at the end of August and was kept up for a week or two after that for school trips and extra hot weekends. The football team even did water exercise there for conditioning. I wish my basketball coach had thought that was a good use of practice time!

Back in June I was at the old pool with my mom and the kids and I went in the office and asked if I could take a picture with my phone of the old picture of the pool that has been hanging in there since I worked there. This is it.

I have always been fascinated by this picture. The pool is exactly the same except that pool house was torn down and replaced in, I think, 2000. In my youth it was always painted white with blue letters and those glass windows were boarded up and painted and the double doors were boarded with a single door built in. The new one is not nearly as stylish but it has a full roof which makes it kind of damp and stuffy but is probably for the best because, let me tell you, a building with no roof is not fun to clean after being empty all winter. Birds can really make a disgusting mess over a few months and the leaves really would pile up too.

I'm not sure how old this picture is and no one else ever seemed to know either. That high diving board was a low board when I was a kid in the 90's and 2000's and now it is gone due to insurance and renovation issues (they renovated and had to remove it to get the grant money, I believe, but there is a waters slide now instead) and my dad said their was a high board when he swam there in the 1960's.

I just love digital photo technology. I never would have thought that I could have this picture for myself but...

Tada! It is perfect for a bathroom, isn't it? Now when I am stuck inside because our back deck is too hot for the baby or because a kid is napping or any other reason I can be reminded of the ice cold water of that pool. It's heated now, which I think I posted about many years ago. I still can't believe that!

And now, although it has nothing to do with the rest of this post, here is a picture of Allan faceplanting in a branch of fresh catnip.