"These people need to leave, Brenda. This is my home." "Your home? You live here because I allow it. This pool is community property now.
I say who swims. I say when." "Please. My wife—" "Your wife is dead, Garrett. Stop hiding behind a ghost and start acting like a man."
Thirty strangers in my backyard, beer cans in the water, my dying wife's design from her hospital bed, and the HOA president directed the whole circus with a megaphone and a smile. She didn't know I build pools for a living, or that hers sat on $52,000 of embezzled HOA funds and a public easement her husband rubber-stamped. I turned her pool into a free public splash park. What happened next, you'll want to hear every word. My name is Garrett Holloway, and I design swimming pools for a living.
Custom residential builds, natural stone coping, vanishing edges, integrated spas. The kind that make a backyard look like it belongs in Architectural Digest. I've been doing it 14 years across Central Texas, hand-selecting every piece of limestone from the same hill country quarry my father took me to as a kid. The smell of that quarry, hot dust and mineral water, still takes me straight back to being 10 years old. But The pool in my backyard at 4817 Lantana Drive wasn't built for a client.
That one was built for Elena. Elena was my wife, 5'3" with a laugh that could fill a room before she finished the joke. She was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer 2 weeks after Colton's eighth birthday. 14 months later, she was gone. But before she left, she did something I carry with me every single day.
She drew a pool. Not a napkin sketch—a real design. She borrowed my drafting software, measured our yard from her hospital window and created a full layout. An E-shaped pool with a natural stone waterfall on the east wall, underwater LEDs that shift from blue to green at sunset, and a shallow wading shelf where Colton could sit with his feet in the water and read. She slid the printout across the hospital bed and said, "Build it for Colton.
He should grow up near water." I built it myself. Six months. Every weekend, most evenings after Colton fell asleep. I hauled limestone in my truck, poured the gunite shell, ran the plumbing, wired the LED system, and set every stone on that waterfall like I was laying bricks in a cathedral.
The filtration runs on salt instead of chlorine. Better for the stone, gentler on Colton's skin. When the water flows at night and the LEDs glow blue-green through the limestone, it looks like something out of a dream. Elena's dream. We moved to Willow Creek Estates because the lot was big, the schools were close, and the HOA fees seemed reasonable.