What follows is a short story I previously published on another platform. I am publishing it here for the first time.

Yesterday, my 5-year old asked if we could go to the pool.

"Sure, of course," I said, so we went, just the two of us.

As luck would have it, no one else was at the pool that day so we had it all to ourselves. I helped him put on his little life vest, and then the plan was to have him play with his water gun on the steps while I laid out for a few minutes.

"Five minutes, okay buddy?" I said.

"No, one or two minutes!" he protested.

I realized I was being a jerk, so I went ahead and just got in the water with him.

My son can't swim yet, so he wanted to hang onto my shoulders while I took him around the pool. As he kicked his feet against the surface of the water, he said, “I’m the motor and you’re the boat, okay daddy?”

We were almost done with our first lap when I heard him freaking out behind me.

"Bee, daddy! Beeeeee!"

I turned around and saw there was a bee in the water, so I splashed water at it to make it drift away from us.

"No, daddy! Let's go get it out of the water!" my son said.

So I took us to the other side of the pool, and with one hand I held onto the wall, and with the other I held onto my son. The two of us formed a human chain as he reached for the bee with his long plastic water gun. I watched my son carefully lift the gun out of the water with the bee sitting on the handle. He then handed it to me, and I gently placed the toy on the side of the pool with the sun shining down on all of us.

My son and I hung onto the pool's edge and stared at the bee as it walked back and forth across the plastic toy. Eventually it began beating its wings to dry them. It was like we were watching a kind of dance as it walked, then beat its wings, then walked, then beat its wings again, until finally, it lifted itself off the plastic gun and floated away.

"Wow, that was so cool!" my son said.

At this point I was thinking that was fun, but now it's over, when my son saw another bee in the water.

"Daddy, we're the pool bug hunters, okay? We have to catch every bug in the pool!"

So we spent the next fifteen minutes rescuing or tossing out all the bugs in the pool, mostly bees.

When we were finally finished, the two of us sat on the edge of the pool with our feet dangling in the water as we looked out at the surface of the water. It was a perfect patch of blue, not one blemish in sight, and I couldn't help but feel the two of us had accomplished something together.

Then my son pointed and said, "Daddy, that leaf blowed into the water!"

I looked and saw a brown leaf floating on the water's surface. I hopped back in and waded over to fish it out while saying to my son, "You mean it blew into the water?"

"Yeah, that leaf blew into the water," he said, stressing the correct word.

As I was making my way back to him, I suddenly saw his face light up as he said, "Blue! Just like the color of the water!"

"No, it sounds the same, but it's not the same word. They're spelled differently. One is blue like the color ..."

"And the other is blew like the wind," he said.

An Afternoon With My Son