Summer’s almost over; in my opinion, not a moment too soon. The middle months of the year aren’t made for the husky gentleman. They’re not made for any adults, really. Few jobs put responsibilities on hold for three months, even for the important business of exploring new and exciting lawn chairs for shirtless drinking.
No, summer is for the young; an all-too-brief opportunity to make hay while the sun shines, before the cloud of adulthood overcasts everything into a grey, disappointing blah for the rest of everything, forever.
For some or most of us, the school-less wonder months went hand-in-hand with day trips to the local swimming pool. Summer without the pool is like a sundae without a cherry, a flip without a flop, Simon without Garfunkel, if you will.
But what seems so natural to a water-friendly kid actually has a lot of work behind it, a truth the community of Sumner lived again this month.
“Again,” because the Sumner community pool’s continued operation has long proven a perennial issue for the Sumner School District, which houses the facility on the Sumner High campus. The question of how and whether to continue operating the pool has come up in one form or another for more than a decade, according to several of the district employees I spoke to when I first wrote about the pool last summer.
Other pools, like the one in Enumclaw, have solved shrinking budgets with community ownership and financing, but the Sumner pool has fought a hard fight against increasingly scarce funds all around. People would hardly be surprised (though certainly disappointed) if it had succumbed to a financial TKO.
But it’s getting another round, and it’s possible—just possible!—the match has turned around. The district signed an agreement to have the pool managed by Sumner/Bonney Lake Aquatics and owner Diana Ekstrom, a veteran swim coach from Buckley.
Ekstrom has a solid plan for offering pool services, and I wish her luck in managing the facility with a keen business sense. The swimming hole may be showing it’s age, but it’s still well-loved by the community.
Enjoy your Labor Day, everyone!
