At 3:00 PM, the day looks inauspicious, and the plan that I crafted myself before dawn—a plan predicated on a dry Sunday afternoon—seems less pleasant than I’d hoped it would be. I had imagined sitting on a bench while kids skated and scooted around me. I’d imagined tea and apple slices and golden hour at Green Lake. Instead, I peer out into maybe-rain and definitely fog, and dusk an hour early. I rather wish I’d been a joiner in this scheme, a casual bystander who could peel off easily, rather than its actual originator. Still, a text pops into view telling me that the others are on their way, and so we should be too. Some ten minutes of arduous parenting and carrying and coat-donning later, during which I’ve loaded two girls, two scooters, and three pairs of roller skates onto our giant bike, and we’re off, sliding through the murky twilight towards the wading pool. As one does, late on January afternoons.

My love for our local wading pool is both well-documented and of long standing. Even before it was the favored leisure spot for a library-addicted teenaged me, we came here even before we moved to Seattle, probably when I was nine or so. It was drained then, and I recall imagining a full wading pool as a vast possibility, public swimming at its finest. I was not a strong swimmer, so the fact that this “free swimming” was in six to ten inches of water was of no concern to me. It was free, fenceless, grand.

There are many of them, these concrete basins, scattered throughout the city. If I were a better or less busy historian, I’d dig up their origin story, because we have got to have more wading pools per capita than lots of places. Someone, sometime long ago, decided that a small amount of water for splashing about in in the summertime was a basic human right. I’d like that person’s great-grandchild to make a similar declaration about public swimming pools of regular size, now that summers are solidly hot so much of the time, but that’s a post for another day. Suffice it to say, we have a whole bunch of wading pools.

Given their title, then, it’s ironic that most of the time I’ve spent at the nearest wading pool has been when it was dry. When my kids were really tiny, it was just two downhill blocks away, the perfect distance for the miniature outings I liked to take with my miniature people. There might be ducks there, or someone might have left behind a ball or two. At Easter, a particular neighbor would to to the nearby Dollar Tree and buy a few cartons of sidewalk chalk eggs, with which we and our fellow young dry-waders would decorate the concrete for a few months. Later, we’d bring scooters or balance bikes, comforted by the security of the 12-inch curbs that theoretically kept the kids from, I don’t know, hopping over the grass and into the lake. We worried about that kind of stuff, back then.

And apart from the many golden afternoons and evenings spent there in the past few summers, my most vivid wading pool memory has a “where where you when” tone to it. Because I was at the wading pool with my daughters, squinting after them with cold-cherry cheeks into the winter sunshine, on the morning of January 6, 2021.

I can still see their wheels running in figure eights around me, one pink balance bike and one pink scooter. The girls were thrilled at the sunshine, thrilled with themselves, thrilled to be out in the world on a crisp and fine winter morning. I didn’t tell them what I saw in brief glances at my tiny phone screen, which revealed the nation’s capitol in the grip of.. what? An uprising? A coup? An attack? I didn’t know then, and had no one to ask. I was out with my daughters, sunk deep in the fog of COVID-19 social distancing in Seattle. There were a few people about, but I didn’t know any of them, these masked strangers. So I squinted down at my phone for a bit then flicked it off, shaking myself the way I see my dogs do now, and looked back around me. The wading pool. The winter sun. The kids who didn’t know what was happening on the other side of their country. The lone mom, carrying grim news in her pocket and her heart without anyone to talk to about it.

We slide down to the wading pool today, almost exactly four years later, as a light mist wafts down over us, blurring the edges of the leafless trees, the gleaming water. Within a few minutes, the first of the friends I invited to join us arrive, bringing bikes and scooters of their own. I help the girls put on their roller skates, then take them off again a few minutes later, when they decide that skating is “too hard,” what with the twelve inches of standing water—thanks to a wet fall and some ill-places leaves—that have crowded the wheeled escapades to the edges of the pool today. More friends arrive, bringing lanterns and stories from winter break, just ending tonight. The kids flit to the edges of the pool, just voices in the twilight, the little lanterns bobbing like colorful fireflies. The parents talk about someone’s trip to Las Vegas, someone else’s travel woes in the Southeast. About plumbing disasters and snowy Christmases. About the year ahead and memories almost faded away.

As Americans, we are leaving behind a season in which everyone was asking each other, themselves, and everyone else one strange question: Are you better off, all told, than you were four years ago? It’s such a complicated question, so individual and personal to carry such a collective weight as it has done. In so many ways, the world feels a bit darker as a whole, even more uncertain than on that bright and unsettling morning, four years ago.

And yet here we are, in the gathering dusk, friends who came out in the darkness, who brought lights, stories, laughter, chasing the gloom away. Making the winter, and the world, just a little bit warmer than it was.