paddling pool
Recently my friend Ishani shared that she'd been enjoying playing in a garden paddling pool with her one-year-old son. This reminded me that water is the best, not just for kids.
Before my parents moved to Lincolnshire where my mum is from, when they were living in a council house in Plymouth where my dad was trying to study architecture and my mum was trying to keep ends meeting, my mum had a friend around the corner with two daughters who were near age mates to me and my brother. My brother must have been hardly more than a baby at that time, as I didn't start school before we came back up north. Those girls were great fun to play with. Throughout my life, there have been folks I've spent time with who in some unspecified way made me feel good, took the anxieties out of me, gave the world back to me sweet as honey. Those girls were the first friends I remember having that power for me. There's a photo of us four kids in a paddling pool on a hot sunny day. I'm not sure whether I actually remember the day or it's just that I've synthesised a memory of it from looking at the photograph, but I'm pretty sure it was a fun day.
I know that my parents struggled hard during that time, from the letters that my mum sent to her own mother which I found and read years later as a young teenager in nanna's back bedroom. The house was dingy and dark; there were problems with neighbours, and other issues. But I remember that time as constant fun and happiness, because of my mum's endless creativity, my dad's playfulness, my brother as a constant companion, friends and others who brought light.
This is the meaning of the paddling pool for me. A small part of the world which is able to contain enough water and enough joy, if we respect and care for each other.