Evening Swim

After 10 months as a slacker, I’ve recently resumed serious swimming drills in the lake.  True, I have an obvious excuse for some of those months (ice), but I should have been back in training by the 4^th of July.   At least by the 4th, if not sooner.

The neighbors don’t know quite what to think of a 64-year old who bodily braves the water amidst all those tickly weeds, and all for the pure joy of aquatic exercise.

“I’ve never seen anyone just keep swimming laps back and forth between piers like that,” one noted with a look of disbelief.

“Don’t you get tired?” another said with obvious pity.

“I couldn’t begin to swim like you do,” a third remarked, and I thought it a compliment.

I don’t deserve the notoriety.  It’s not so hard, I tell them, when you float like a marshmallow.  (No obvious symbolism intended.) I evidently inherited this handy trait from my mother, who could also float as if lying on a mattress at rest with toes, knees, hands, and head protruding from the water.  Swimming isn’t so hard when you automatically stay on top.  I call it the cork factor.

And so every evening I trek down to the end of the pier in my swimsuit as the sun is setting, don my goggles and earplugs, and dive in. While swimming back and forth between neighboring piers, I pretend to be Jacques Cousteau watching an underwater seascape through my goggles.  Sometimes the bluegill and bass don’t seem to notice or care when I approach, but treat me like one of their kind.  Various vibrant green weeds sway with underwater currents, part to let me pass, and offer a soothing choreography unappreciated by above-water viewers.

This evening the sun set low in the sky on the westward leg of my swimming course, and the moon rose on the eastward leg.  I breathed heavily, in and out, in and out as I swam, relaxed and at peace. My body sliced a path through silky, July-warm water that closed behind me to cover any evidence of my passing, even as I was held and uplifted by it.

Wonderful water, my second home.