Sunday’s humidity got my daughter thinking about the green plastic frog pool that we keep in the basement.

"Can we use the pool today?" my daughter asked as she watched the children two buildings away splash and frolic in their own kiddie pool.

I can’t think of a warm day when she hasn’t asked me to take out the pool.

Usually my answer is a short and not so sweet: "No." And a don’t have anything  against her cooling off in the summer.

The quick answer is this: the tenants in our building no longer have access to the basement hose. Seems that, back in the day when the kids did splash and frolic in our green plastic frog pool,  the old hose leaked and we got the basement a tad wet.

But today my daughter had a new idea: "I’ll fill the pool myself," she said. "I can carry buckets of water up from the basement."

Looking forward as I was to a quiet Sunday afternoon rest on the plastic lawn chair in our front yard, I couldn’t argue with my daughter’s self-occupying plan to fill the green plastic pool one bucket of water at a time.

Heck, I’d probably get through the entire Sunday Times’ in the time it’ll take her to fill that pool.

So I carried the pool up from the basement and she began the labor intensive task of filling the pool. And as the kids in the building and the kids next door got wind of my daughter’s shallow pool, the fun was non-stop.

And then my downstair’s neighbor, sipping wine and eating antipasto with me at the green plastic table, remembered something.

Last year when neighbors on Third Street moved back to Manhattan, they gave us all the backyard equipment they wouldn’t be using anymore: the green plastic table, chairs and…

A HOSE!

Soon a long hose was being threaded out the basement window gushing beautiful, cold water. The children were ecstatic: my daughter’s shallow plastic green frog pool was  filling with more water than it had seen in years.  At this, the kids next door, ran home and got out of their wet play clothes and into swimsuits. This was serious SWIMTIME!

The kids splashed and frolicked in the  pool unti dusk when they got so cold they couldn’t stand it anymore. My daughter, goosebumped and shivering, wrapped herself in a colorful beach towel.

When I emptied the green pool onto the sidewalk, the children watched the water stream toward Sixth Avenue sparkling in the apricot  light of the setting sun.