I was recently talking to someone that was thinking about moving to Colosse, the southern city in which I was raised. I warned him about the heat and the hurricanes and all manner of things, but he would not be deterred. Which I think is great. I loved Colosse and it still hurts to have left it sometimes.
I gave him a piece of advice when looking for a home that I think a lot of people from colder climates don’t always appreciate: If you’re looking at buying a house in the places with hot climates, make sure that you know the score on the swimming pool situation. I didn’t realize until I moved to Deseret that there were places that swimming pools weren’t de facto family civic centers.
I was raised in a neighborhood with a free swimming pool with no membership required. Other neighborhoods had annual pool fees, which were invariably worth it if you had kids. Others, though, had waiting lists. Those are deadly. Imagine your kid being excluded from playing with his friends because they all want to go to the pool and your kid can’t. And you can’t mitigate this by having a swimming pool in the back yard. Not unless you have a high dive*, a low-dive, a 20ft “deep end”**, and room for fifty or so.
The pool in the neighborhood that I was raised and in neighborhoods surrounding it was more than just a place that you could go and swim. It was, as mentioned above, a civic center of sorts. It was free babysitting. A place for kids to go, expend all their energy, and then come home. By and large, over the summer the pool took school’s place as the most important place in my life outside the home… and I wasn’t even a swimmer-type person the way that my wife was when she was younger.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of people from colder climates where pools are not so universal (because you can only swim in them a couple months of the year) don’t realize the importance of the swimming pool and find out too late that they’ve landed somewhere where their kid can’t go to the pool every day.
* - High dives were mostly taken out of public pools a couple decades ago, which just makes me angry. Insurance and lawsuits and all that. I remember how excited I was when I found a place with a high dive in Deseret. Man that was a thrill. A greater thrill at 28 than I think it was at 12.
** - I hear deep-ends are insurancially problematic as well. More’s the tragedy on that.
Ironically, while our pool *could* be such a place… we have two problems.
The first is the quality of the neighbor kids (even though we have a minor “deep end” and small diving board).
The second is that they only open it up between memorial day and labor day… between certain hours… because they have to have lifeguards (insurance reasons) and don’t want to hire anything other than $6/hour high school kids as “lifeguards.”
Comment by Webmaster — September 19, 2008 @ 7:46 am
Luckily for those of us here in NYC Metro, while pools are closed during outside of the Memorial Day-Labour Day window, there are plenty of beaches if one is inclined to go swimming. Mind you, after mid-September or a warm October, the beaches are usually devoid…
Comment by David Alexander — September 19, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
Living in a place where the kids could swim year round would be great. My kids love the pool and are always sad when the weather gets too cold to go to one every Saturday.
Comment by Abel — September 19, 2008 @ 10:29 pm
Web, the Memorial-to-Labor calendar is pretty typical in my experience, though our neighborhood pool was still open on the weekends. Scheduling was built around the ability of high school kids to be lifeguards but also because when kids are in school the demand is much less substantial.
David, there were always beaches around where I grew up, but they were pretty crummy beaches. Then again, when we went up to the northeast for vacation many years ago, the beaches there were just dreadful to. Delosian beaches have (among other things) seaweed and polution problems. The beaches where we went (I want to say Massachusetts and its suburb states?) had water that didn’t really move or didn’t get deeep.
Abel, Deseret had some pretty neat indoor pools. “Indoor pools” was something that I had almost no recognition of while living in the south, but I guess out there they are more necessary.
Comment by trumwill — September 21, 2008 @ 8:38 pm