My Bean Shaped Pool
“Isn't it always the heart that wants to wash
the elephant, begging the body to do it
with soap and water, a ladder, hands,
in tree-shade big enough for the vast savannahs
of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,
the cratered full moon's light fuelling
the windy spooling memory of elephant?”
I never thought I would be a person who could say they owned a pool, or even a house, but I do. Even so, I’m not a water person. The pool came with the house which was built back in the days when the average Australian could expect a quarter acre block with a house and a pool as a starting point. But like crumbling columns and statues with amputated arms my 1980’s bean shaped pool is a testament to when life came with a different set of expectations in an Australia which has faded from view.
Season after season the pool is dormant under the sun. It chews power and resources, requiring skilled people to come in once a month to tend to the pump and sweep the leaves that fall from the mango tree. Every time the bill arrives, I threaten to fill it in and plant roses or vegetables to a chorus of people who tell me to “think about the resale value - everybody wants a pool.”
It’s assumed now that every house will be sold as every family will move on. The generations splinter, they no longer pass things on.
So, I put up with the pool even though it eats through funds and I never so much as dip a toe into it. I am its custodian, like the curators in museums who guard and polish all things old so that future generations can see what life was like before them, that’s if they look up from their phones.
In the last three years while I’ve taken photographs of my pool, the thick smog of bushfires has floated over it, and the steady howl of Australian native animals can be heard from the TV as they burn. After the bushfires it was the ‘once in a century’ floods that have happened three times this year alone that have swept people from their homes. All the while the entire global population has lined up in masks to be vaccinated with something unknown. I know the earth has turned on its axis. We will never be that place again and in the scheme of things, my bean shaped pool seems luxuriously redundant.
It wasn’t always this way. I used to be a water person.
In the summer before I learned that those I trusted and loved could abandon me for no reason, or that other people I loved could die suddenly when a blood clot travelled to their heart and the infrastructure of life could shift to unimaginable places in an instant, swimming in a pool was my reason for existence.
My grandfather also owned a bean shaped pool even though he couldn’t swim. When my mother vanished on one of her trips always which lasted for years, my brother and I spent entire summers in it, needing only the blue African sky above and the cut of cold clear water to keep us entertained from dawn to dusk. Afterwards we’d shiver under towels on the pavers and soak up the heat from the sun absorbed within them.
There was never a moment to think of climate change or revolution.
One afternoon we laughed so loud I looked up to find my grandfather had left his study and stood at the pool railing watching us. He smiled in a way I’d only ever seen when he held a glass of whisky. “Come in I shouted” as he turned and waved himself away.
Within months he was dead with a blood clot to the aorta and life would change. We didn’t know it then but that was our last summer of childhood.
My grandfather believed in magic. He carried a large silver coin with a numerology grid on one side and astrology symbols on the other. He might not have been able to foresee his death but perhaps the stars told him what the future might hold for his grandchildren. It was the trust he left that allowed me to have a bean shaped pool today. He was European from a generation that believed that blood, even adopted blood, is thicker and that value gets passed down time after time.
As I look out at my pool today, I wonder when exactly I lost my love of water. Was it the summer my grandfather died or do the small pleasures we start with, and take for granted, simply flake away. It’s times like these I recall the lines of Barbara Ras’ moving meditation on life and the cyclical nature of loss as an image of a ten-year old girl floats up to me on the day her tough talking Italian grandfather turned into a boy who wished he could swim.
“It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,
the few real loves-of-your-life and how much of the rest—
the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly,
unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things
like Popsicles unthinkingly.
And though dailiness may have no place
for the ones that have etched themselves in the laugh lines
and frown lines on the face that's harder and harder
to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life
will appear in a dream, arriving
with the weight and certitude of an elephant,
and it's always the heart that wants to go out and wash
the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories
that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean. “
Poem - Washing the Elephant - Barbara Ras
