My parents wanted a house first and a backyard second. When they found out their backyard consisted mainly of water, they surely must have had second thoughts about the house.

But buy it they did, and the pool came with it.

For all you families out there thinking that having a pool is great fun, it isn’t.

Having a pool means cleaning the pool and maintaining the pool and pouring various chemicals into the pool just so your blonde aunts and uncles can climb out of it and curse you out for ruining their coiffures.

Then, of course, you have to use it.

I mean, if you’ve spent all this time making it swimmable, you have to do at least a couple of laps.

This is generally made more difficult by the fact that an outside pool is as cold as ice. Possibly colder. I don’t know what liquid nitrogen feels like at room temperature, but I would say the pool is approximately as cold as that.

Somehow, I’m always the one who has to swim 20 or 30 or even — egads — 50 laps in the backyard pool. But it always feels like 627 laps to me.

My dad, warm and snug in a turtleneck when it’s 80 degrees out, tells me the pool’s temperature can’t be all that much cooler than it is outside.

“I-I-It is c-c-cooler,” I say, my teeth chattering.

“I like when you talk funny,” cries a kid cousin (one of a group of freeloaders who come over to swim in my family’s backyard). “Do it again!”

I’m just about ready to splash the kid cousin with about 40 gallons of liquid ice (is that a thing? It feels like it should be a thing) when they do a cannonball into the deep end.

I’m immediately drenched. Again. And it somehow gets colder.

But I am a Paskhaver, and we Paskhavers do not take splashes with a grain of salt. No, when splashed, we return the favor.

So I wait ‘til my kid cousin surfaces and whip my hand across the surface of the water. I throw a mighty wave of water at him.

The kid ducks underwater to avoid the bubbly blast. Curses!

“Curses!” I say aloud, just in time to receive a mouthful of water. As I hack and cough my way over to the shallow end, I hear my kid cousin yell, “You sound funny! Cough again!”

So having a pool isn’t all it’s cut out to be. But there are benefits. For one, it brings the neighborhood dogs to the yard.

My neighbor’s dog is named Happy, as in Gilmore. The minute the cover came off our pool, she made a beeline from my neighbor’s yard and jumped right in.

Okay, okay, so she might have jumped in a week after the pool was opened. But she looked so darn cute doing a doggy paddle in the water that it almost made me forget all the detriments of having a pool, like having all these people in the yard.

I guess my house’s pool will continue to be a gathering spot for humans and canines of all kinds.

And I wish I could say more about it, but I have to finish these laps. On the positive side, there are only 626 left to go.

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Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.