The Pool My Husband Built
My husband Marcus built that pool with his own hands over the course of two summers, and he was so proud of it that he used to stand on the back porch in the evenings and just look at it. Not swimming, not using it, just looking at it with the satisfaction of a man who had made a thing that was real and permanent and his. He was that kind of person, the kind who needed to build things, who felt incomplete if he was not in the middle of some project that would leave evidence of his presence in the physical world. He had built the deck the first summer we owned the house, and the raised vegetable beds the summer after, and the children’s playset the year Noah turned three, measuring and cutting and sanding in the evenings after the children were in bed, coming inside smelling of sawdust and looking tired and satisfied in the way that only people who make things with their hands are satisfied.
The pool was the largest project he ever attempted. He started with research, months of it, reading manuals and watching videos and consulting with a structural engineer friend from his college years who helped him understand the grading and the drainage and the rebar configuration. He made drawings. He revised the drawings. He calculated materials and ordered them and re-ordered when he realized he had measured wrong and was not ashamed about it, simply ordered more.
He started digging the first summer. He rented an excavator and spent a weekend moving earth, and the children, who were six, four, two, and not yet born, came out to watch the excavator as if it were a performance staged for their specific entertainment. He finished the foundation and the shell by September, when the weather turned and forced a pause, and the half-finished pool sat in the backyard through the winter covered with a tarp, and he would go out sometimes and stand beside it in his coat and look at it the way you look at something that is becoming itself.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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