The Goldfish Summer of '62

Margaret stood at the edge of the empty swimming pool, her cane tapping gently against the concrete. Fifty years had passed since this place had echoed with children's laughter, but she could still hear it—the splashing, the shouting, her mother calling them all to dinner.

She closed her eyes and was suddenly twelve again, her dark hair still thick and un-streaked with silver, running barefoot across the hot concrete with her sisters. The pool had been their kingdom, their escape from the summer heat, their gathering place where neighborhood children became family.

"You're going to lose that goldfish," her grandfather had warned when she won it at the fair, but she'd cradled the plastic bag home like a precious jewel. And somehow, improbably, that goldfish had lived. She named him Captain, and he became their summer's silent witness, swimming in his bowl on the pool house shelf while life swirled around him.

The cat—a scrappy calico kitten someone had dropped at the farm gate—had appeared that July. Margaret's mother, practical woman that she was, declared they had no use for another mouth to feed. But the children had named her Clementine, and Clementine had made herself at home, often found curled atop the goldfish bowl, tail twitching as she watched Captain swim in endless circles. Perhaps it was the cat's lazy guardianship that kept the goldfish safe from curious little hands.

That August, Margaret's youngest brother Tommy—barely five—had fallen into the deep end before he'd learned to swim. She remembered the silence as he went under, the terror, the splash as her father dove in fully clothed. Tommy had emerged sputtering and crying, wrapped in his father's arms while her mother wept with relief. Captain the goldfish had swum calmly through it all. Clementine had merely opened one yellow eye before returning to her nap.

Now, Margaret's own grandchildren were grown. Her hair, once so dark, was white as summer clouds. She couldn't run anymore—her knees saw to that—but she could remember running, could feel phantom sunlight on her face, could still hear the splash of bodies hitting water.

She looked at the pool house, now boarded and silent. Captain and Clementine were long gone, their brief lives lived and lost before Margaret had even married. But they remained somehow—part of the fabric of who she was, of who she had become.

"You know," she said aloud to the empty pool, "I think that was the summer I learned that some things endure—not because they last, but because they matter."

The goldfish had lived its whole life in a glass bowl. The cat had ruled their farm for fifteen years. And that pool, dry and cracked as it was, still held everything that had mattered most.

Margaret turned her cane and walked slowly back toward the house, already thinking about which story she would tell her great-granddaughter when she came to visit next week. Perhaps the one about the summer they almost lost Tommy in the pool. Or the one about the cat who guarded a goldfish. Or maybe, she thought, smiling—it would be the one about how love, like water, finds its way into everything.