Part 3 of 5 in A Love Letter to Fairmount

The wading pool at Sister Cities Park was a square, with a thin stream of water that ran into it from a hill at the back of the park. On a hot day there were dozens of kids in it. The water was an inch deep at the edge and maybe a foot and a half in the middle, depending on how far you walked in.

My son went there most days when the weather broke ninety, sometimes with his nanny and sometimes with me. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from our house. He was barefoot, in a blue baby swimsuit — shorts and a shirt, sharks on it. He waded in until the water reached above his knees — eight inches, ten inches — and stopped there. It was cold, he was hot.

The stream that feeds the wading pool meanders down the hill, intentionally designed to be climbed up (and fenced off the top to prevent accidental 40 foot falls). Kids climbed it — through the dirt, on the rocks, or on the stepping stones set into the slope. The hill was the second attraction, after the pool. At the top, there was a net bridge you could stand on, or lie down on if you wanted. I had been going to Sister Cities for two years before I climbed the hill a few months ago. The net bridge at the top was right there the whole time.

The pool was free. It was open to anyone who showed up. That was the entire access policy. That got you a lot of people — kids of all ages, parents, grandparents. The pool was small enough that you could see everyone in it from any edge.

There were water toys all over the place — buckets, watering cans, plastic cups, a couple of those big molded boats you could sit in. Kids borrowed each other's toys, mostly nicely. My son had a bad habit of using other kids' toys (which was fine because I asked the parents' permission) and then not giving them back to the kid who actually owned the toy. I was trying to teach him to share.