Memory of the Day

Today my niece Hana was swimming at our house waiting for her mom to arrive. She kept asking me different things she could do in the water - holding her breath, somersaults, floating etc. It brought back all the things Vinny and I used to do in my grandparents' inground swimming pool. This was one of our favorites (though never done in the sight of adults - especially my grandmother): we would stand in the shallow end, jumping up and down hitting our arms against the water as much and as hard as possible. This would make waves in the pool. We would do this until the waves were so high in the pool that my grandmother's lovely planted flower barrels on the lower deck would get hit with waves. Then we would see who could swim the length of the pool above water. For some reason I always remember doing this on rainy days. Go figure. Maybe it was easier to cover up the massive amounts of water that ended up outside of the pool. It seemed so daring at the time and we loved it.