Chlorine Summer Blues

When I moved to Florida, I brought with me many assumptions. Endless summer, I guess. That it smelled like coconut oil and chlorine. That every day might include a pool, late afternoons with David Hockney's arcs and squiggles dancing in rectangles of aquamarine and cerulean blue:

(though this was California)

But life fits itself back into more familiar shapes, and there's just as much sitting in rooms, inside, at desks, in front of screens, as there was before, up north. Maybe more.

But every so often, nudged by national holidays, I remember that I'm here, and there can be more late afternoons steeped deep in blue, that somehow particularly American swimming pool blue, that Hockney saw better than the rest of us did, (having coming from someplace else).