Recently dear friends invited Andy and me to a pool party, with the special purpose of our grandson meeting their two grandchildren; all three eleven or twelve years old. Though I’d worried how the arranged introduction would work, the kids clicked right away and we grandparents quickly sank into the background and looked on.

Nestled among blocks of condos and pretty gardens, the pool was attractive and inviting, at most five feet deep. At first, the three kids had it to themselves; later they were joined by a younger boy, whose furrowed-brow mom bent over her laptop at a nearby table. A young couple arrived to claim chaises in the sun, he was very buff, her moves bikini-conscious and preening. If they’d come for a quiet Friday afternoon’s tanning, though, that wasn’t in the cards.

For the kids were in and out, in and out, up and down, all around the pool. In pairs, trios, or solo, floating on pool noodles or jousting with them. “Splash!” was the operative word. “Look at me!” “In your face!” A blue ball occasionally came into play, so did water guns. Jump in, haul out! Jump again, come as close to cannonballing as you can manage in a shallow pool. Much sloshing, legs and arms dripping, and right away, get wet again! Oh, and sudden splashes of talk, jokes told. Always shouts.

After an hour or so, supper being spread out on a nearby table, three soggy towel-wrapped bodies sat down to eat with us grownups. Conversationally, the kids barely left the pool behind: chatter, corny jokes flipped off, interspersed with mouthfuls and the sprays of yet more jokes. Boasts. The adults flung in chat and questions but were mostly relegated to the status of eaters.

Then. “Can we go back in the water?!”

From the moment the kids had first plunged in, however, I’d been seeing back in time, watching myself and my friends in The Pond. Back in 1958, when I, too, was twelve and then on into my teens.

I was still dazzled at having moved to Cape Cod; my family’s property “Nauset Haven” featured nine summer rental cottages among pine trees on the shores of Minister’s Pond. We hosted families like us who stayed for their week or two of precious vacation; thus I met “the cottage kids.” Sometimes I invited local friends over, too. Quickly I came to love swimming. I finally conquered my long-held fear of not being able to touch the bottom and started rising through Red Cross swimming achievement levels.

In The Pond, I was just there. In the moment. The kids and I moved from splash to jump to dive to climb up the ladder and pant. And over again: into and out of water, shouts, mock screams. Falling in, trying a sailor dive, floating in an inner-tube, getting capsized. Rocking the float. Racing each other to shore. Who could dive best? I’d learned the hard way about pond diving: very soon after breaking the surface, you had to turn your gathered fingertips upward or end up in deep cold water grappling with tangles of weeds.

Of course, we pushed each other around; later (as an adult) when I swam at a large and strictly-regulated beach, I heard the manager bark on a loudspeaker, “No horsing around on the float!” and thought, But that’s what you do. Why on earth not?

On our float back then, one summer’s variation was “Pick ____ up and drag her/him over to the edge of the float!” This lasted until I ruined the backside of a brand-new bathing suit in one afternoon, to my mother’s great annoyance. (I did extra chores to earn the cost of its replacement.) In general, though, our fun had few limits.

Our golden retriever waded around the shallows, dipping his snout for stones and abandoned duck eggs. Gingerly he’d mouth an egg, drop it in the reeds on shore, and blissfully roll around all over the smeary mess — then plod back in, looking for another. One guest’s golden used to swim out and place its paws on the owner’s shoulders, in search of sociability; Mr. C. steered the heavy, water-laden hound back to shore, where parents watched from the beach. A visiting grandfather spent afternoons in a beach chair with his feet in the shallows, gazing, grinning.

Some late afternoons, my father would come down after work, paddle an inner tube out to the center, and float off the troubles of his day. Sometimes I’d break away and go out and say hello to him, but I didn’t stay long: I was missing too much action.

I just adored it all.

And I still do. I love water, love the essential feeling of my skin surrounded by it. Somehow my body relaxes in water as nowhere else. These days I swim gentle laps of sidestroke and backstroke; I don’t dive. I tread water with a leisurely bicycling motion and love to converse as I do—or to be alone, in and of the water.

But now I’m thinking about all that so-called “horsing around.” In its most benign sense, perhaps that’s the key to these memories and my joy at watching the kids. For my grandson and his friends, and the cottage kids and I, were very like young colts frisking around. Prancing, trying things out. No longer little ones who needed parents to guard our every move, yet we weren’t yet teens, either, with summer jobs or moods or bodies to feel self-conscious about. We were still kids in the years before things got serious, before the push to college, jobs, and Real Life.

We were free to move and splash and play, in a moment of time separate from the rest of our lives. Waves and ripples stood in for the ebb and flow of impulse. With friends and sun for company, we moved in a free zone indeed, the water-time of life.