Forum: Return of the swimming pool Mermaid
Published 1:30 am Saturday, June 13, 2026
HERALD FORUM| Edie Everette
I once believed that everyone was born knowing how to swim, that everyone grew up across the alley from a kidney shaped pool owned by a doctor. A man who, before adding chlorine to his pool, produced a clear plastic kit that held vials of Listerine blue and cherry red liquids. As a child, I watched in awe as he dipped the kit’s empty vial into the pool and held it up to the sun.
The doctor and his wife had a daughter my age with whom I swam like a fish all summer. We waited all winter for the end of May when it became time to heat the pool. I do not remember learning how; I only remember swimming. Maybe I was like those babies in the 1970s who were told to hum before being tossed into the deep end.
Decades later I am back to regular swimming after joining my local YMCA. It’s a thrill to see dozens of children at their swimming lessons, eventually moving fluid as fish and becoming safe around water in the process. During lessons they squeal, wear tiny goggles with darling swimsuits and roughhouse while their guardians stay dry on benches and look at their phones.
As a teenager, when the doctor and his family were away on holiday, I held pool parties. The next day, all their deck furniture could be found at the bottom of a pool that now resembled a flooded living room. How did my friends and I have all that time back then to swim and loll in the sun, to drink beer, smoke and kiss under a flat blue sky?
Sometimes while swimming laps at the Y, if I twist my hips just a bit up and down, I feel like a Mermaid with a tail. I once created a series of Mermaid drawings for a gallery exhibit in Kirkland. I depicted Mermaids reading books, doing their hair, and smoothing their glittering scales amidst undulating sea grass. These drawings, on 5 by 5-foot sheets of paper, did not satisfy the gallery owner. She walked into my Seattle art studio, saw them, and refused to exhibit even one. After she left, I rolled them all up together and put them in a nearby dumpster. Years later, an art critic I knew said she had found them and hung them all over her bedroom.
A few years back I lived near a river where I waited for late summer when the water became warm enough to swim in. Like an endless pool, one can swim in place against the current. I likened shutting my eyes and floating with the current to ‘letting go and letting the universe’ carry me where I was supposed to go. Yet, after just a few moments of floating, my eyes sprung open as I quickly swam back to where I could see my towel on the bank.
At the YMCA, lifeguards pace back and forth alongside the pool; their countenance is serious because they are true lifesavers. Their pacing reminds me of the jungle cats I saw at the Woodland Park Zoo decades back when all that those stunning creatures had were small cages to pace back and forth in forever.
A few weeks ago, while daydreaming about making swimming pool sculptures out of clay because blue glazes resemble water after being fired, I hit the top of my head on the edge of the pool so hard that the lifeguard heard it. “Let me know if you start feeling dizzy,” she walked over and said as I stood in the water rubbing my head.
Alas, other than a daydreamer’s head bump, life is going swimmingly. Come on in, the water is fine!
Edie Everette is an artist and writer living in Snohomish County.
