Closing the Pool

Every spring, we open the pool: a phone call to the pool man, turn the heater on, scrub the deck and the pool cover; children so anxious for water play that they swim in Arctic temperatures.
Every fall we close the pool: call the pool man, stack the cushions and pool toys into the pool house, wash and store the beach towels. The children complain, but they are back in school and have tired of swimming.
This year the pool man came while I was gone. Later that day, I went to check if the pool was shut down for the year.
And I sat down and cried.
I remembered too clearly the past spring when we opened the pool. I remembered too clearly the children, years earlier, toddling through my life.
I grasped that if I blinked, it would be time to re-open the pool, or see another daughter's marriage, another child's high school graduation.
Matthew Arnold, the English critic/poet wrote in 1851, "Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Sopphocles long ago Heard it on the AEgean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow..."
...of my life; only the ebb and flow (and passing) of my life is measured "by the closing of the pool."