When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #16

Story #16 - The Swimming Pool – I nearly drowned – those darn boys!
Do you like to go swimming? Isn’t it the best fun!

My father built a swimming pool in our back yard. I was probably about 5 or 6 years old when it was built. Living in southwest New Mexico it got very hot in the summer. It was not uncommon for the temperature to hang around 100 degrees in July and August. It was a dry heat. If you were sweaty from working, you just stood still and the hot sun would bake you dry! There wasn’t any humidity in the air. The pool seemed huge to me at that age. When I was older I realized it wasn’t that big. My dad and brothers helped dig out the big hole. It was probably about 5 feet deep and 15 by 25 feet in diameter. He over-layed it all in concrete. Now that I think about it that must have cost a fortune back then! He built a one-foot high wall around the entire top edge of the pool to make it a little deeper and also we could sit on the sides. He built a three by three-foot pump area and the filter kept the water clean. He also had a sidewalk of concrete paved around the entire pool. Let me tell you in that hot sun it burned our bare feet. We didn’t spend a whole lot of time standing on that concrete! It sure was nice though when you wanted to dry off. We would lay our towels down on the hot concrete and we would be dry in no time!

We had so much fun playing in that pool! My dad had some old inner tubes from car tires. We pumped those up with air and then played on those in the pool. You could bend them and sit on them like ponies and we had a ball! We tried to pull each other off of them. One day my father brought home an airplane tire tube. At 6 years old that seemed HUGE! Six kids could sit on that tube. We had so much fun with that. Two of us would stand up on the tube and keep balanced and someone else would push us across the pool. We would stand on the wall edge of the pool and dive through that tube. What fun! Well my brothers were all sitting on the tube with their legs dangling through the middle of it, the hole, and I was swimming under the water. We would swim back and forth under the water across the pool. We would dive for things. We kept our eyes open. That wasn’t good because they would get red from the chlorine in the pool. Well I was swimming under the water and had to come up for air. When I tried to come up my head bumped into the bottom on that huge tube. Then I would move and try to come up again. I bumped my head again on the tube. I was running out of air! I made it over to where the ladder was and came up. I gulped in enough air to gasp for breath. Then I screamed at the top of my lungs at my brothers. “You’re trying to kill me! You want to drown me!” They denied that! What was I talking about! They didn’t see me! I ran into the house and told my mom what they did. She came out to investigate. My brothers honestly told her that they did not know I was under there and did not see me. Well I was sure they were trying to drown me! She told us all to be more careful and LOOK where they were going. I can look back on that now and realize they were just having fun and not paying attention and probably didn’t feel that little bump under the airplane tire tube. It was big! They were kicking their legs to get the tube to move across the water. Well after that happened I was a lot more careful when I was under water!

On a side note—we would get brown as Indians from swimming in the summer. My dad said the only white patch we had was where our swimsuits covered! Our hair would bleach out white blonde from the sun. We must have looked funny with our very blue eyes, blonde white hair and very brown skin! The town where we lived had a population that was 60% Mexican, 40% Caucasian.