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salt water naked
Thursday, July 7 2011
Susan is the memoirist at whose house in Bearsville I've been gradually salvaging a surprising amount of firewood (in the aftermath of a dominos-style tree windthrow this past winter or spring). Recently she had a pool installed, and the interesting thing about that pool is that instead of chlorine, it uses a mild salt solution to suppress the growth of algæ (and, perhaps, bacteria). This morning Susan told Gretchen that we could come over any time for a swim, and so this afternoon we decided to take her up on it.
Susan wasn't actually there; instead we encountered the overnight dogsitter. I met her later; my first destination was the blowdown site, where there was still more than enough salavageable wood to fill the parts of the Subaru not necessary for transporting Sally, Eleanor, Gretchen, and myself. At first I tried bucking up more of the lower trunk of the large hickory whose fall had precipitated the rest of the other treefalls, but it seemed to contain metal, so I decided to just leave it and concentrate on my other options, including a large White Oak limb that was still badly (and somewhat dangerously) hung up. I managed to cut a bunch of it down. By the time I'd filled the car, there was enough wood on the ground for yet another load.
Susan's new pool is so new that there isn't any sort of patio around it; it's just a pool in the middle of a stony patch of dirt (the material is typical of an old river terrace or perhaps a glacial moraine). I joked to Susan's house sitter that it reminded me of the way pools can be in places like Guatemala, though "actually in Guatemala they like to tile around their pools with peasants like the way you've seen in an Escher print, with one peasant's head in another's armpit." But it turns out that Susan will have to wait a year before tiling the grounds around her pool with anything; it will take that long to settle.
My first mission once I was done with the firewood salvaging was to thoroughly clean those parts of my body that had been exposed to Poison Ivy. Lucky for me, Susan's new pool also includes an outdoor shower. I washed all my clothes and scrubbed by arms and lower legs with shower gel.
I was wearing a bathing suit, as was the dog sitter (a woman who looked like she might have been to the original Woodstock as a young adult), though Gretchen was the one who was bathing Woodstock-style, that is, completely in the buff. It turns that the dog sitter had, in keeping with her originalist Woodstock vibe, had wanted to swim in the pool naked too, but for some reason Gretchen had discouraged her, saying that I am "very shy." But I wouldn't have cared at all.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110707 feedback
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