It is Memorial Day morning in Massachusetts. I just checked the weather. Fifty-four degrees. Rain. Not a drizzle — actual rain, the kind that has been going since last night and shows no sign of stopping before afternoon at the earliest.

And I want to tell you something that I did not fully expect to feel this strongly: I am so grateful that pool is closed.

Not just closed for this weekend. Closed for the season. Covered. Silent. Not my problem.

Because if things had gone differently, if I had made the other decision, today would look very different. I would have spent $8,000 replacing the heater that failed at the end of last season. I would have spent another $1,000 to $1,500 on opening service. Chemicals. Shock treatment. The labor to get the cover off and haul it away and store it somewhere. The filter inspection. The pump startup. All of it — before a single person gets in the water. Before a single degree of warmth appears in the forecast.

And today would be 54 degrees and raining.

Let Me Tell You What This Pool Actually Was

The pool at my house in Massachusetts is about 30 years old. It came with the property. I did not install it — I inherited it the way you inherit a lot of things when you buy a house, with a vague optimism that it will be worth the hassle and a slowly dawning realization that it will not.

For several years I maintained it. Opened it every spring. Paid for chemicals all summer. Paid to close it every fall. Paid for the repairs that showed up because something always shows up. A pool that old is not a feature. It is a project. An ongoing, expensive, seasonal project that competes for your attention and your money and your weekends from April through October whether you want it to or not.

And then last fall the heater started making sounds it should not be making. The kind of sounds that a repairman listens to for thirty seconds before giving you a number that makes you sit down. The heater needed to be replaced. The quote came back at $8,000.

I want you to sit with that number for a moment. Eight thousand dollars. For a piece of equipment on a thirty-year-old pool. That is not a repair. That is a decision point. That is the universe asking you directly whether you actually want this pool or whether you have just been maintaining it out of inertia because you never stopped to do the math.

I Did the Math

Ten thousand dollars before the pool is open. On a weekend where it is 54 degrees and raining.

I want to be fair about something here. If today were 80 degrees and clear, would I feel a flicker of nostalgia standing in my backyard looking at that covered pool? Probably. I would be lying if I said I would feel nothing. There is a version of summer in New England — the perfect July afternoon, the kind that only happens a handful of times a year — where a pool in the backyard looks exactly right. I understand the appeal. I lived it for years.

But here is the honest truth that I keep coming back to. Even on a perfect July afternoon, the pool would still have cost $10,000 to open this spring. The math does not change because the sun came out. The heater bill does not become reasonable because the temperature hit 80. The thirty years of wear on the shell and the plumbing and the equipment do not disappear because one afternoon feels like summer.

Nothing justifies the cost. That is not hyperbole. It is just arithmetic.

What Nobody Talks About

People talk about the financial cost of pool ownership. That conversation is uncomfortable but it is at least happening. What people talk about less — what I was not fully prepared for until I started living through this year — is the weight of it.

Owning a pool is not just expensive. It is heavy. There is a low-level background anxiety that comes with having a large body of water in your backyard, particularly when you have young children, and that anxiety does not take weekends off. Every time the back door opens you are aware of it. Every time you have people over with kids who are not your own you are doing a mental calculation. Every time you see a news story about a child drowning you feel something that does not go away quickly.

People normalize this. They buy the fence and the alarm and the cover lock and they tell themselves they have managed the risk appropriately. And maybe they have. But managed risk is not the same as no risk. And the relief of genuinely not having to manage it anymore — not this summer, not any summer once the pool is gone — is something I did not fully appreciate until I was standing on the other side of it.

That relief alone — separate from the money, separate from the math, separate from everything practical — is worth the decision. I did not know how much of my mental bandwidth that pool was consuming until I gave it back to myself.

The Weather Is Doing Me a Favor

I want to acknowledge something. The fact that it is 54 degrees and raining on Memorial Day in Massachusetts is almost comically on the nose for my point. New England could not have scripted a better argument for pool removal than this specific morning. I recognize that. I am not pretending this is a neutral data point.

But it is also just the reality of where we live. This is what Memorial Day looks like in Massachusetts about half the time. Some years it is perfect. Some years it is exactly this. And a pool does not know the difference. The opening costs are the same. The maintenance costs are the same. The heater bill is the same regardless of whether Memorial Day is 80 and sunny or 54 and raining.

That is the part that took me longest to really internalize. The costs are fixed. The weather is variable. You are paying a fixed cost for a variable benefit and in New England the variable goes against you with a frequency that makes the math increasingly hard to defend as the pool gets older and the costs get higher.

I have a friend who lives in Arizona. He has a pool and uses it eleven months out of the year. He should keep it. The math works for him. His version of Memorial Day weekend is probably 95 degrees and clear. His pool earns what it costs.

Mine did not. Most pools in Massachusetts do not. Most pools in Ohio do not. Most pools in Minnesota absolutely do not. The geographic reality of pool ownership in cold weather states is that you are paying year-round for something you use for a fraction of the year, and most people with aging pools are paying more than they realize for less than they think.

What This Morning Actually Looks Like

So here is what Memorial Day 2026 looks like at my house in Massachusetts.

It is raining. My kids are inside doing what kids do on rainy holiday mornings. I made coffee. I looked out the back window at the yard — at the covered pool sitting there quietly, not demanding anything from me — and I felt something that I can only describe as peace.

Not absence of joy. Not resignation. Peace. The specific peace that comes from having made a decision you were not sure about and then being handed perfect evidence that you made the right one.

I did not spend $10,000 this spring. I do not have a pool heater humming out back trying to warm up water that nobody will swim in today. I do not have chemicals to check or filters to inspect or a cover to deal with or a single thing related to that pool on my to-do list this weekend. It is covered. It is closed. It is not my problem this summer.

And when it rains on the Fourth of July, or on a random Tuesday in August when everyone is at work, or on Labor Day weekend when New England once again reminds you it does what it wants — I will feel the same thing. Not the sting of a pool sitting unused. Just the quiet of a decision already made.

If You Are On the Fence Right Now

I know some of you reading this are in the same place I was a year ago. You have a pool that is aging. The costs are climbing. Something needs to be repaired or replaced. And you keep thinking that maybe this will be the summer that makes it worth it — that the weather will cooperate, that the kids will use it more, that the math will finally pencil out the way it did in your head when you first moved in.

I am not here to tell you what to do. I am here to tell you what I know from living through it.

The math does not get better. The pool does not get younger. The repair bills do not stop coming. And the weather — especially if you live anywhere in the northern half of this country — is going to give you plenty of mornings that look exactly like this one. Fifty-four degrees. Raining. Pool covered. Season not even started yet.

The question is not whether you will eventually remove the pool. For most homeowners with aging pools in cold weather states, the question is only when. The sooner you make the decision honestly, the sooner you stop paying for something that is costing you more than it is worth.

If you want to understand what removal actually costs before you talk to anyone, visit our Pool Removal Cost Guide. If you have questions about the process, our Pool Removal FAQ covers everything I wish I had known earlier. And if you are ready to find out what a specialist in your area would actually charge for your specific pool, you can get a free quote here.

It is raining outside. The pool is closed. I am going to make another cup of coffee.

Happy Memorial Day.