Night Swimming

My brother and I, gypsies on every holiday, went back to the community park where we’d grown up to watch the Independence Day fireworks, remembering the long days of swimming in the pool and the hot July 4th nights of watching fireworks from the water, never wanting to get out. It was truly magical when they turned the lights on, a completely different place from the daytime. The lights even look hazy and starry, just the way they did with a day’s worth of chlorine in your eyes.

I was never very good at organized sports but I could swim, like a fish, from the time my sister first put me in a pool when I was a toddler. I lived to swim every summer growing up.

The fireworks weren’t bad, but not as good as the memories of night swimming.