I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite things to do here in Franklin County is make my way to the YMCA in Rocky Mount to use the pool.

Well, now it’s even better because I have two pool friends, Jennifer and Jim, both of whom also enjoy swimming on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. (There are four swimming lanes in the pool so we have room for one more! Come join us!)

Jennifer is a new-ish swimmer, in the pool because she’s really a runner with an injury. Jim is former lifeguard who used to tend the posh swimmers at the Homestead resort back in the day. More recently he was a dentist in Allegheny County and is now retired and lives near Smith Mountain Lake.

Both of my new friends are complimentary about my swimming habit of plodding up and down the lane nonstop for as long as I can. Jim even asked for pointers on flip-turns.

I am aware that this request may have been a conversation starter (like many of my Franklin County neighbors, Jim is a conversational guy), because we then chatted about this and that until I got so cold standing around the pool that I had to excuse myself to, you know, find some dry clothes. However, their polite words make me feel like:

But the excitement wasn’t over once I left Rocky Mount. I took a fresh route home from the Y, trying to rely more on my instinct for direction and less on the map apps on the phone.

I got lost.

But along the way, I saw a most amazing lawn decoration. In the front yard of a home was a decorative outhouse, complete with a propped-open door and a pair of jeans attached to the seat as if a ghostly pooper was seated therein. Unfortunately, I whizzed by (see what I did there?) too fast for a photo, but my next trip to the pool now has an objective other than snappier flip turns.