Under the Sea

The summer I turned 8, I went swimming in my next-door neighbor's pool almost everyday. I would pretend that I was a mermaid and that the old, mechanical pool cleaner was actually a column of seaweed. I would swim around and around the cleaner down to the bottom and then back up again. I would lie down on the bottom of the shallow end of the pool and look up at the sky and the light streaming through the water. I stayed in that pool for hours.