In the best class I took in college, some theology course I can't remember the name of, our professor told us that "hell is the memory of a lost good, which can never be regained." I'm sure this is a quote but I can't find the source and I'm too lazy to dig out my notes. Anyway, it's a concept that's stuck with me through Southern Baptist detox.

My grandmother's house, in northern Indiana, is one of two places from my childhood that still exist and are available to me. The place we visit in Florida is the other. My parents and other grandparents have moved multiple times, and besides, none of their homes held as many fond memories and so few painful ones as my grandmother's house does.

She has a great kidney-shaped pool in her backyard, separated from the shady, grassy part we played in by a tall green and white metal fence. It has been there since before I was born. There is a diving board, and a twisting fiberglass slide with just the right angles to launch you airbourne before plopping you into the middle of the pool. The inside perimeter of the pool has a shelf so smaller children can walk along the edges all the way around.

I am describing the pool, but in my mind I see the concrete at eye level, warm against my face. I hear the creak and thud of the diving board; I smell that fiberglass slide. My grandmother grows tomatoes along the fenceline, and along one stretch the plants grow just a few feet from the water. I can smell them, their heat, even sitting here on a chilly evening in my living room.

There is a grassy area there beside the pool patio, and my sister and I spent many summer weeks and weekends laying out, reading books, soaking up skin cancer while my brother and cousins played in the water, and my grandmother and aunts and uncles laughed with my parents, sipping wine and cocktails watered down by melted ice. It was tradition for us to beg our grandma to go down the slide, and for her to eventually give in, flying into the water and coming up laughing. I can hear her laugh and the ice clattering to the bottom of empty cups and the sliding scrape of the screen door opening; I see the towels and chairs and plastic tumblers; all like it was just this last weekend.

This morning I called my grandma to schedule a visit. She's so healthy -- she is almost 90 but swims every day that it's warm enough for the pool to be open, mows her own lawn, does a lot of gardening, etc. Still, though, I have lost sleep recently, panicked that something will happen to her sooner rather than later. There will not be enough time with her, for me -- that is a fact that cannot be changed, due to the distance between us, my grandma's age, and the ages of my children.

So I scheduled a visit for just the girls and me to go, and I was surprised at how afraid I felt when the visit had to be pushed back even one week. I don't know why I'm so emotional about this.

During the conversation, she mentioned that she'd finally decided to have her pool filled in. The men are to begin the job this week. I told her I thought that was good -- she's been debating having it done for years, and the pool is terribly expensive and difficult to maintain. But! I am devastated. I've spent most of the day fighting back tears when I think about it.

I can't even imagine how she must feel about it. She has memories of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren enjoying that same pool over the course of 50 years. Both of her husbands. Both of her siblings. Beloved dogs long dead used to race to the diving bay, barking and jumping in after anyone who went off the diving board. She swam laps in it every day, doing a modified breast stroke to keep her hair dry, humming to herself.

It is just a pool, but it is more. I have a sense that if I could just keep her house exactly as it has always been, then I could go back and revisit these other times that are, really and truly, lost and gone forever. For years I've entertained fantasies of moving up there and buying her house. I love the house, and I love having solid ground to hold onto. My grandma is unchanging. God bless her, she dresses the same as she did 20 years ago, her house is the same, she says the same things, has the same mannerisms, and the maddest she's ever been at me was when my sister and our cousin ate some chocolates she'd been hoarding in her fridge. [For years.] She has never said an unkind thing to me in my entire life.

So, I am a snotty snorting mess over this stupid pool, and what it represents -- what it stood for in the past, and what the closing of it means.