The Last Cookout of the Season

The morning after Labor Day, the pool is a different body of water. Overnight the maples have laid a thin skin of leaves across its surface. The water, left alone since the last swim of the weekend, has gone still and clear and cold. The air above it carries a September smell — grass that has finally stopped growing, damp concrete, the first faint ghost of wood smoke from a neighbor's chimney.

Somebody will have to clean it out. Somebody will have to lower the water, shock it, blow out the lines, and pull the cover across. But not yet, not this week. In the first days of September the pool sits between seasons, waiting on the household's decision.

The First Monday in September

Labor Day has always been the cutoff. The children go back to school that week, and the pool that spent August loud and busy from noon until dark goes quiet during the school day. The afternoon swims become afterschool swims, hurried, with the sun already dropping behind the fence by four-thirty.

The last weekend, though, the pool gets its farewell. Relatives come. Friends who have not been seen all summer appear as if summoned. Someone brings a floating volleyball net, and the water, still holding August's warmth through the long afternoons, is the warmest it will be all year. The nights come earlier than in July, and the water cools fast after sunset, so the swimming happens in that long golden stretch between three o'clock and dinner. The pools with heaters get one last debate, argued in the shorthand of people married a long time — whether the cost of a warm weekend is worth it now that the air is cold enough that nobody stays in for long.

Across town, the schedules differ. Some pools are covered the very weekend of the holiday, their close-out finished before the last hot dog is eaten. Others stay open deep into the month, until the mornings are so cold that the water does not become bearable until one or two in the afternoon. Every yard makes its own call; the calendar only marks the month. But the week after Labor Day, the question hangs over every pool in the neighborhood the way the wood smoke hangs at dusk.

The Final Cookout

The cookout and the closing are the same ritual in two parts. The last meal comes first, at the picnic table and in the folding chairs arranged in a ragged circle on the grass. It is a September meal, which is to say it is a farewell meal that refuses to call itself one.

Someone stands at the grill turning burgers. The corn is the last of the season, tight and sweet, bought from a roadside stand that in the same week has started stacking pumpkins where the tomatoes used to sit. The garden delivers its final tomatoes, big and warm, sliced thick on a plate with salt. There is potato salad made that morning and hot dogs for the ones who only eat hot dogs, and there is watermelon, because watermelon is the tablecloth of a cookout and somebody will always mention the seeds while somebody else buys it anyway. The goldenrod is out along the fence. The basil has gone to flower.

In late September the light does a particular thing. It comes in low and heavy-gilt, poured across the yard like honey. The shadows go long before the first plate is served, and by the time dessert is considered, the air has turned. People who arrived in short sleeves reach for flannel shirts from the backs of their chairs. The fire pit is lit before dessert, not after, because the fire has a job tonight.

The braver guests swim before dinner — the last swim, though nobody calls it that at the time. They go in while the sun still reaches the deep end and come out shivering, towels around their shoulders, teeth chattering through the first round of burgers. The water is not August's water. It has a cold seam running along the bottom, and anyone who stays in too long feels the legs go numb. Somebody always dares a cannonball and lands with a gasp. It is the last cannonball of the season, and nobody says that either.

Dessert is the crossover, the point where the season tips. It might be an apple pie from the first of the early drops, served warm with a scoop of vanilla. It might be the last peach cobbler. It might be s'mores, the graham crackers going soft in the dew while the marshmallows slump and hiss on the ends of sticks. The children hold theirs up to the flames. The adults hold coffee in ceramic mugs, and the mugs have the shape of a season that has decided to end.

The grill gets its own goodnight. After the coals have gone gray, it is scraped and brushed and covered for the last time. The grate is washed and oiled against October rain. Somebody carries the table in. Somebody folds the chairs. The string lights stay up another weekend or two, because taking them down is a declaration no one is ready to make.

Closing the Pool

Pool closing is a chore with a liturgy. Its order, practiced by generations, feels as fixed as a service. First the water is balanced — the chlorine shocked, the pH settled, everything adjusted to a chemistry that can survive five months of cold and dark without going green. Then the water level is lowered to below the skimmer, so the ice that forms over winter will have room to expand and move without cracking the tile.

The lines come next. A shop vacuum, set to blow, is fitted to the returns, and the water is pushed out of the pipes in a great gasp, burping up through the surface in cloudy gouts. Antifreeze goes down the lines that will not fully drain. The pump is drained, its strainer basket cleaned of a summer's worth of hair and pine needles and the remains of a plastic frog, and the motor is carried into the garage, where it will wait on the shelf beside the snowblower until the thaw. The filter is rinsed and left open to dry.

Then the cover. It comes out of the shed smelling of last winter — dead leaves, cold vinyl. It is unfolded and pulled across the surface like a duvet over a sleeping child, while someone skims the last of the leaves and someone else slides the air pillows underneath to absorb the pressure of the ice. The water underneath goes dark. The cover pump is set in place and plugged in, and its low hum becomes the new sound of the yard.

The ladder comes off the side and leans against the fence. A diving board, if there is one, is strapped upright. The skimmer is capped. One of the smaller children lingers and asks whether the pool is asleep, and gets an answer meant to satisfy precisely the way such answers are: it is asleep until June.

The Covered Shape

What remains after the closing is not a pool but a suggestion of one — a long, dark mound under the cover, weighted at the edges, gathering leaves in its folds. Branches will fall on it. Rain will puddle at its low spots, and the cover pump will tick and run through October and November until the water freezes thick. The yard is quieter now. The pump that ran all summer with its open-throated hum is silent, and the silence registers at the kitchen window in a way the noise never did.

By the equinox, the last cookouts of the neighborhood have all been held. The evidence is in the evenings: fire pits burning low through the weekday dark, jackets, breath showing at the edge of the light. The mornings arrive cold. The noon sun still has work to do, but it does it weakly, and by five o'clock the shadows have won.

Closing the pool is an act of faith performed in reverse. To lower, to drain, to cover — these are not endings so much as stowings. The water stays down there in the dark, treated and tolerant, and the family that covered it trusts that spring will return, that the cover will come off, that the first swim will feel exactly as the last one felt, months earlier, on a September afternoon, in the low golden light, with the air going cool and the corn sweet and everybody still wearing summer like a coat they had not yet needed to take off.

The last cookout and the closing of the pool are one tradition, really. They are the way a household thanks a season before turning out its lights. The meal is the thanks. The cover is the goodnight. And the months between — the gray ones, the white ones — are simply the distance from one September to the next.

Photos: Shixart1985 (CC BY 2.0)