It's Not Just About The Pools
This may be a repeat of a previous post, or it may be an idea I’ve been holding in my heart and pondering for a long time.
We’ve just returned from another visit with our Virginia Family, and spending time in NoVA always brings up so many emotions. I adore being there surrounded by faces of all different colors and hues, people dressed in a vast assortment and styles and looks, hearing languages I recognize and languages I don’t.
Our children learned to swim in Reston, VA. Monkey, and possibly Buster, had official swimming lessons at one of the Reston Community Centers, but Yessa taught herself to swim in the Reston pools. We had 15 pools to choose from, scattered around Reston.
For less than $75-100 I could purchase annual pool passes for our entire family. For an additional small fee, I could add in a guest pass for whenever someone came to visit.
We spent hours in these pools, the whole family, or just the children and me, all summer long.
Reston was a planned community, designed to provide spaces and opportunities for peoples of all races, religions, and economic backgrounds to live, play, and work together.
Having multiple inexpensive pools was part of that vision.
I investigated various membership options for getting us access to a swimming pool when we made the move to Nashville. There are country club options that were outside our economic price point, and also held as much appeal for us philosophically as the gated community in the back of our neighborhood.
We were members of the Y for awhile, an option that cost over $1K for the first year when counting joining charges, plus monthly fees.
We won membership at the beautiful outdoor community center pool for $50 through our church auction for several years. The membership would have been $500-700 dollars if we had purchased it.
There are no “open” public pools within neighborhoods. Many communities have their own pool that HOA fees provide; where you can swim with your neighbors and their friends they choose to invite.
There’s a pool downtown at the Sportsplex that we could drive 20 minutes to get to. To swim with random people on random days. (If you know my family, you understand that this would not appeal for many reasons.)
In Reston we would see people we knew or people we recognized from around our community. We could easily go swimming with friends and family because it was so inexpensive everyone got pool passes.
It was a way of life, but, it was a conscious decision by the founder of Reston, Bob Simon, and the other folks who brought the vision of what Reston could be to life. Like the paths we walked and biked on, and the public library being right next door to the shelter where folks could go for food and housing when needed, the physical spaces have so much impact on interactions.
I miss that with a deep ache.
Life wasn’t perfect there and there were racial and economic tensions, but it was a good place to raise children.
It was never just about the pools.
