dec 12/SWIM

1.5 loops
100 laps
ywca pool

More swimming! Another day off from running because my glute is sore. I miss winter running, but I’m happy to get the chance to swim again. Today I put a set of 10 x 100 on 1:30 with 15 seconds rest in the middle of my continuous 200s. Was able to get the heart rate up to 166 for some part of it — average for the whole swim was 133.

Pool friends: more shadows, a guy in blue swim trunks next to me, swimming freestyle; a woman in my lane, in blue, swimming almost in the middle of the lane and swimming slow enough that I passed by her almost every other lap; 2 women aqua walking (too leisurely to be called aqua jogging), brainstorming Christmas gift ideas — the woman nearest to me was in a bright blue suit and had strong, graceful legs under the water. Lots of blue.

As always, I did a lot of counting strokes, but not laps, and flip turns. I don’t remember thinking about much. I wondered if my hip/glute would start hurting; it didn’t. I wondered how many laps I had done and when Scott would show up at the end of my lane.

For the last 5 minutes, the pool emptied out. I think there was only one other person swimming with me — they were in the far lane. Friday afternoon is a good time to come, I guess.

Before the swim, I proofread my manuscript — and found a few errors — and discovered that Ken Burns is doing a documentary about Thoreau. The whole thing will be out in March, but a small 22 minute preview is available now on youtube. Nice! I started watching it and thinking about the late 1800s — what was happening here in Minneapolis and St. Paul, what was happening with Laura Ingalls (Scott and I are watching the entire Little House tv series), and what was happening in the country — the Civil War, the Mankato 38, transcendentalism, romanticism, self-reliance, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman. (I could add the rest of the world here, too). A couple of Christmases ago, I got the annotated Pioneer Girl and I think I’ll try to read it this spring. It’s helpful to put all of these dates together; it makes them seem less in the past, more part of a continuous present.

Ken Burns documentary, coming in March

After my swim, Scott and I were talking in the hot tub about the many layers of dating involved with the Little House stories: 1. the “actual” events, 2. the events as perceived/lived by Laura, 3. her telling of them in Pioneer Girl, 4. her re-telling of them with her daughter Rose in the Little House books, 5. the various generations of kids who have read/been obsessed with the books, 6. and the 1970s television show.

SWOLF

(added a few hours later): I almost forgot to write about SWOLF. It’s a new swimming metric on my Apple watch. Had to look it up because I had no idea what it meant.

SWOLF = swim + golf = measuring your efficiency by combining time for a lap with number of strokes taken (source) .

Just like you want a lower stroke count in golf, a lower number for your SWOLF is good and means your more efficient swimmer. I don’t understand (or play) golf, so I’m not sure how deep the comparison is. Is it just a matter of a lower number is better? Anyway, according to my watch, my SWOLF number is good, which means I am efficient swimmer, which I already knew. I don’t care that much about metrics — maybe because mine are good (not great, but also not bad) and I don’t need to worry about them — but I might try to find some fun ways to experiment with SWOLF in my poetry — as an acronym? A different portmanteau? — and my training — are there sets I can do to decrease my number? I’d like to play around with the idea of efficiency — an efficient machine — and the benefits and harms of increased efficiency, in swimming, in writing, in life.

SWOLF = soon we open like feathers / She wants only laughing fools / Sara washes out last fall / sassy Waynes orchestrate loud frolics / sick waterways often lack freedom / sleet: winter’s other liquid form / some wedding officiants lack feeling / sharks want our love finally / swimming while on life’s feather (FWA) / stinky wet owls like fish (FWA) / sipping whisky on lingering flowers (FWA) / slender wisps organize lavish festivals

dec 11/SWIM

1.5 loops
104 laps
ywca pool

Hooray for swimming! My right upper glute still hurts — not all of the time; it’s very localized, but when it hurts, it hurts. Thankfully swimming doesn’t bother it. Biking didn’t either, yesterday. I’m not sure if running would, but I’m not willing to try and risk making it even more sore.

Today’s swim friends: shadows on the pool floor; slashes of orange everywhere (mostly signs indicating which lanes were for lap swimming); a small clump of hair; chlorine; a guy in black swim trunks doing a combo of swimming near the bottom, aqua jogging, and freestyle; a woman in a blue and green suit swimming freestyle then backstroke, her arms sweeping so wide they went under the lane line and brushed against my arm in the next lane; a woman in a pale blue or white suit sharing my lane, swimming freestyle and breaststroke and backstroke and some strange hybrid of butterfly on her back.

A nice swim, I didn’t count my laps, just my stokes. Halfway through I did a breathing ladder, by 50s: breathe ever 2/3/4/5/6/7/6/5/4/3/2. I also did a set of 2 or 3 200s in which I breathed 3/4/5/6 and kicked harder on the even breaths.

Just before we left, I (think) I finished my manuscript. It’s 79 pages and I’m very proud of it. I’ve officially been writing these poems for 4 years, but they build off of attention work I’ve been doing since I started this log in 2017. I’ll submit it to a contest this month, and if I don’t win that (these things are always very competitive and based on many factors that don’t have anything to do with the quality of the work), I’ll send it out to other places.

dec 10/SHOVELBIKE

60 minutes
4 inches
22 degrees

Not sure why 4 inches took almost an hour to do, but it did. The snow was light and dry and easy to push around but I had a lot of area to cover: a front sidewalk, back sidewalk, side sidewalk, small driveway and a deck. All with a shitty shovel. Now, I’m tired. But I don’t care. While I shoveled, I listened to a musical I’ve never heard before — or only heard one of its songs: 3 Bedroom House — Bat Boy. I liked it, well, most of it. One thing that stood out to me: the songs actually told the story. Usually, if I’m listening to a musical and I don’t know the whole story, the songs don’t help, or they give me some of the story but leave crucial bits out. Camelot, I’m talking to you.

A few minutes later, talking to Scott about the musical, I realized how fitting it is to be listening to it — bats! The title of my manuscript is Echo | | location!

10 Things

  1. a group of young kids — in elementary school, I think — walking to school, laughing, calling out, stopping to throw snowballs at each other
  2. 2 women (moms?) pulling occupied sleds towards a school (1.5 blocks away), then empty sleds back again a few minutes later
  3. a burnt coffee smell
  4. a car with an engine that needs a tune-up pulling up to the daycare next door — sputtering
  5. a little girl getting out the car, trudging through deep snow
  6. robins bursting out of our crab apple tree in the backyard
  7. a thick slab of snow on each of our three garbage cans (organics, trash, recycling) looking like vanilla frosting
  8. a neighbor down the alley starting a snow blower
  9. the sharp, scratchy scrap of the metal tip of our bright green shovel on bare sidewalk
  10. the creak/groan of our wrought-iron gate

more manuscript

Thanks to past Sara who left the tab open . . .

the kids next door just came out to play in the front yard — SNOW!, one kid yelled. They’re completely covered in snowsuits, with their hoods up — I used to be annoyed by these kids, but I’ve grown to really like them. They’re always so kind to RJP and FWA when they see them. HAPPY SNOW DAY — a woman called out to them. HAPPY SNOW DAY!!! — one girl replied.

. . . who left the tab open on the computer to an entry in which I talk about daylighting, I remembered that I wanted to write a poem about it, that is, the effort/desire to bring buried creeks aboveground again. Yes! And I’ll put it in the river section, which needs at least one more poem. Before shoveling, I had the idea to take lines from different descriptions of these creeks/springs/ghost rivers and turn them into a cento.

As I shoveled and listened to a line in Bat Boy: the Musical about being let into the light, I had a flash of a thought and a line:

Being outside —
less the light
more the air

I was thinking about how I want to move away from reinforcing the idea that light = good, and dark = bad. Sometimes, with my vision I want/need more light, and sometimes it’s too bright, too much. I don’t mind the dark. I was also thinking about how much I crave/need fresh air. But — maybe for the underground streams it is not a need of air, but space, the room to flow naturally over the topography instead of being buried in a concrete coffin.

okay — these kids are too cute. They just said hi to FWA (as he walked by with Delia) — HI! Have a good day! And now they’re greeting everyone as they walk by, and everyone is returning their greeting with enthusiasm. Hi! / Hi! Are you having fun in the snow? / Yes! . . . FWA came back from the walk and I asked him about the kids. He told me that they said they liked his dog and then the littlest one said something he couldn’t understand — blah blah blah named Soda. He said, What?, and she repeated, blah blah blah named Soda. FWA replied, oh, you have a dog named Soda? That’s cute!

exhumation of streams from underground and reintroduction of them to the surface

exhuming
of bodies —
buried streams
coffined creeks
returned to
the surface
not only
to light, but
open space
and their place
of origin
(or open space/and their source)

Today, I’ll start with these sources for inspiration:

Reaching the Light of Day
“The Urban Mile: The Subterraeam Streams of St. Paul in Subterraean Twin Cities
Daylighting Phalen Creek
 Bridal Veil Falls

(hours later) I read the above sources, and fit some phrases into my triple (berry) chant form. I think I can some of these and shape them into a poem!

urban

waterways

the same path
but below,
under our
feet, under
the ground

natural
waterways —
flow through top-
ography

of a landscape

collective
memory

water, un
ruly, will
not be man-

aged
refuses

to obey

cities, planned
neighborhoods
rooted, creeks
rerouted

caverns, sink
holes, passage
ways deep in

archive of
memory
reflection
on all that
has been lost

she wonders
what a day-
lighted world
could look like

a pipe — the
container
for a
muted stream

not lost, but
forgotten
hidden from
view, walled-in
yet 
flowing still

down here it’s
difficult
to trace the

pedigree
of a pipe
to unearth
its stories
to trace its
influence,
on a place
its people

a creek, its
meadows and
woodlands re-
placed with new
neighbors: streets,
tunnels, pipes,
ditches, wells,
basements for

new houses.
once mighty
waterway
turned from creek
to brook to
rill to no
thing that could
be seen.
industry
buried the
creek that fed
the falls

from a
300
acre wet
land that fed
a creek that
followed
a bank that
spilled over
a ledge and
into a
river, lots
platted, a
street grid
 laid,
a railroad

arrives, ponds
filled, a
freeway built,
neighborhoods
developed

Some things I’d like to remember from what I read: some of the falls/springs/creeks by the river have dried up, no longer exist, others are not lost, only buried, housed in sewer pipes, flowing through massive underground tunnels. In Subterranean Twin Cities, the author — Greg Brick — mentioned how difficult and costly it would be to even attempt to get rid of these waterways altogether. Burying these creeks privileges a particular set of values over other values, comes at the expense of certain communities, cuts people off from their histories, their connection to a place, their waterways.

echoes of the past, of the still-present waterways: seeps, springs, sewer pipes — the dripping or trickling or flushing gushing rushing of water in ravines — it’s all around, and always there when she runs.

bike: 25 minutes
basement

After sitting for much of the day and feeling a twinge in my right glute (maybe) because of it*, I decided to do a short bike ride in the basement. I watched a short feature on a triathlete I like, Taylor Spivey. It felt good to move and get my heart rate up a little — avg. of 120 — from my resting rate of 54. My range = 49-142. All the running and swimming has given me a very fit heart, I think.

*either reasons why I have a glute twinge: overdid the 1/2 pigeon pose in my yoga session yesterday or a delayed reaction to the uneven snow-covered paths.

Last week, Scott tried the treadmill and it wouldn’t work at all. I decided to see if, magically, it had fixed itself. Yes! It was working. I only walked today, but it’s nice to know that if I’m snowed in, I could run in the basement again.

dec 8/RUN

5.25 miles
the flats and back
20 degrees / feels like 5 / snow
100% snow-covered

2 days ago, I mentioned that my next run should be to the flats so I could study the river surface. So that’s where I went this late morning and into the early afternoon: the flats. Unfortunately, there was no surface to study, only white. I had a late start to the run because I was trying to put my yaktrax back on. I might need a bigger size. How long did it take me to finally get them on? 10 maybe 15 or 20 minutes. That’s a long time to be sitting inside wrapped up in all my winter running layers!

Almost everything outside was white. White sky, white ground, white rock, white river. There were a few strips of worn down snow on the path, but a lot of it was lumpy and soft. I twisted my foot/ankle at least once on the uneven ground, but not hard enough to cause a problem. The conditions made it harder, but I didn’t mind too much. It was so quiet and calm and beautiful beside the gorge.

10 Things

  1. another running in a bright orange jacket — encountered them twice
  2. the bright headlights from an approaching bike
  3. under the I-94 bridge, 1: a few streaks of open water
  4. under the I-94 bridge, 2: honk honk honk — some gathered geese, gabbing
  5. heading north, no notice of the wind
  6. heading south, wind in my face
  7. approaching a woman — I was heading north, her south, I could see the snow flying up around her feet from the wind
  8. the bells of St. Thomas chiming and chiming and chiming at noon
  9. brightly colored (I can’t quite remember the colors — maybe pink and orange and blue?) graffiti under the bridges
  10. as I approached the franklin bridge from below, the wind picked up and I felt the arctic air, under the arch, a shopping cart

mental victory of the run: Even though I wanted to stop to rest my legs, sore from the uneven terrain, I kept going until I reached the bottom of the hill.

I had some success writing drafts for my m//other and g||host poems this morning before my run. During and just after the run, on my walk home, I had some thoughts about the third poem, t here involving the dotted line on the map that runs through the middle of the Mississippi River on the map indicating the dividing line between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Here’s a draft that I spoke into my phone. It needs some work!

if you look
on the map
between the
here of this
side and the
there of that
side, a dotted
line was drawn to
represent
that moment
mid-river
when one city
becomes the
other. Do
you think, if
you were to
swim across,
you could feel
this shift, could
find this place
where a there
becomes a
here and a
here becomes
a there? I’m
willing to
believe it
exists, this
space where both
here and there
dwell, a place
where both are
possible.

dec 7/SWIM

1.25 loops
90 laps
ywca pool

Swimming on a Sunday morning is always risky. 4 out of the 6 lanes are closed to lap swimmers and open for a water aerobics class. Today I got there about 10 minutes before the class began and the pool was almost empty. Slowly it started filling up, mostly with people taking the class. For a big chunk of my swim I was still able to have a lane to myself. I liked watching the people doing water aerobics — mostly women, at least 1 or 2 men — especially their sassy legs. I described them to Scott as sassy because I couldn’t think of a better word for the way, exuberantly and with attitude, they jumped or pointed their toes or lifted their legs. They were feeling good, which was fun to witness. I love how happy people are when they get to move more freely through water.

note: I had a good swim. I felt strong and powerful and I enjoyed watching the class, but I was also irritated by some other swimmers and my own inability to see. I’ll mention it here, but I’d rather remember the good parts of the swim.

locker room encounters

Exiting the shower, encountering a friendly woman who said, you still have some soap on your face. I replied: oh, thanks for letting me know!

an older (late 50s or 60s?) woman in a swim suit looking confused as she entered a section of lockers. She looked around, then left, then entered another set of lockers and stopped in front of one, hesitated, then put her key in the lock confidently.

another woman, older than the older woman, returning to her locker from the shower. Wheezing in a high-pitched and pained way, almost sounding like she was whispering, help me help me

dec 6/RUN

4.1 miles
minnehaha falls and back
20 degrees
85% snow-covered

Yes! More amazing winter running! Not only wonderful physically, but creatively and mentally too. Near the end of the run, I had some great ideas for my manuscript (see below)! And I had some mental victories: I kept running without stopping to walk until I reached the halfway point; I not only kept running past the yellow crosswalk sign at 38th — a spot that always seems to loom too far in the distance — but I kept going past it until I reached the parking lot at 35th.

I’m glad I wore my yaktrax today. The path conditions were not the greatest — soft, uneven snow, some ice, not too many bare spots. I could tell my legs were having to work harder, which I think is a good thing for building strength.

I’m pretty sure I heard the falls falling, but I was distracted by people. I reached my favorite observation spot alone, but within 15 seconds, a group of 20 somethings were hovering around it, so I left without studying the falls.

The river was white with a few dark streaks. I never got close enough to it to see anything more about it than that. I need to run to the flats so I can study its surface.

overheard: one woman to another as they walked: but what does it mean?

Sometimes the sky was gray, sometimes white, and a few times the palest blue.

After I finished my run, walking past a favorite house (where Matt the Cat lives and whose owner gave me beautiful flowers from her boulevard garden this past summer), something delightful happened: As I walked under a pine tree, the wind picked up and a dust of snow fell on my head. Immediately I thought of Robert Frost’s poem, “A Dust of Snow,” which I memorized a few years ago. Unlike Frost, I was already in a good mood when I felt the snow, so I didn’t need to have it changed, but it was delightful nonetheless. Later at home I realized something else delightful. In Frost’s poem, it is a hemlock tree. I think the tree that gifted me snow is a hemlock, too!

manuscript ideas

  1. change title of poem, “Better here, in the familiar, to fade” to “Vision Lost” — turn better here into a “breathing with: may swenson” poem
  2. turn my, “a gash, a gap, a space of possibility” into 3 poems: m//other (gash) into the story of my mom — her death from cancer her severing of ties from this childhood home / g||host into a poem about my estrangement from my body and the mind/body split — or, my vision loss? / turn t here (possibility) into a poem about the in-between and Nothing space
  3. add in a section in which I offer up, in a list, all of 1, 2, and 3 syllable words in the collection, where 1 syllable = rock, 2 syllable = river, and 3 syllable = air
  4. (before the run I was revising Rush and erosion and JJJJJerome Ellis’ stutter as clearing — see 3 oct 2025 entry for more) do a poem that invokes ED’s elemental rust and is plays with ideas of decay as erosion and bells with rusted tongues — am I remembering that right?

I hope I didn’t forget anything

dec 5/RUN

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
25 degrees / snow showers
100% snow-covered

Another wonderful run! Wore my yaktrax and hardly slipped at all. It was warmer with less wind. And it was quiet. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker by calling out, I love this! I love winter running! He called back, Michigan, right? A year or two ago we had discussed winter running and I had mentioned that I was from the UP in Michigan. Nice memory, Dave!

Everything was white and gray and soft. At least an inch of soft snow on the trail. Encountered at least one fat tire, several walkers, including Dave, and a pair of runners. I remember looking out over the open space of the gorge, but I don’t remember what the river looked like. Was it completely covered?

I stopped at the trestle to breathe in the quiet. It was quiet, and it wasn’t. A woodpecker pecking on a tree, or was it a squirrel trying to crack a nut? The voices of the 2 runners passing by. Someone blasting music out of a car radio. A guy walking a dog and talking on a bluetooth.

I noticed something I’ve never noticed before. Just south of the trestle, there are 2 tall wooden posts sticking out of the ground, about 6 feet apart. Above them are thatched wooden slats. What is/was this?

2 wooden posts near the railroad trestle, a woodpecker, a goose, snow / 5 dec 2025

I read a few more of Jana Prikryl’s poems from MIDWOOD. Here’s one that uses a favorite word of mine, still, and uses time to describe one’s location in space:

TEN O’CLOCK/ Jana Prikryl

Holding perfectly still at this party
a clutch of talkers, he’s at my four o’clock
you are at ten and you’ve cupped the fingers
of my left hand with the fingers of your left hand
as though no one will notice the little link
my whole occupation is holding still
so this may continue
all my feeling refuses
to toss the pebble in the current

dec 4/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
9 degrees / feels like 0
50% snow-covered

The coldest run of the season, so far. All the layers, including the hand warmers, which I wouldn’t have used if I didn’t already have an open pair from FWA. No yaktrax today, and I (think I) regret it. I thought the path would be clear enough today without them, but I was wrong. My feet felt very strange when I first started running without the spikes (and without the more cushiony Saucony Rides that I’ve worn all week — today I wore Brooks Ghosts). It was hard, my legs felt heavy. I only wanted to to run a mile. But I kept going and by the time I got to under the Ford bridge I decided that I could keep going to the falls.

The creek is half frozen, and the water still flowing seemed thick and sluggish. Water was still rushing over the ledge, but there was less of it. About half of the falls is frozen with huge columns of ice.

10 Things

  1. the strong smell of weed in the 44th street parking lot
  2. the voices of kids playing on the school playground
  3. the river surface is more ice than water, and white
  4. very few people out walking or running
  5. the rumble of a park worker’s mini-truck at the falls
  6. empty parking lots at the falls
  7. empty benches, too
  8. the smell of a fire on Lena Smith bvld — coming from someone’s chimney
  9. the wind rushed through dead leaves on a tree — they sounded like rushing water
  10. the green gate at the falls’ steps is now closed and locked

I just checked out Jana Prikryl’s Midwood. It’s all about the middle of things, and midlife.

MIDWOOD 1/ Jana Prikryl

Out of the garment of the land
out of the
of

There in the ravine the place
that’s deepest,
bent

I found an interview with her, and found this last bit interesting:

So there is little punctuation, and I avoided titles at first because they’re so performative. Ultimately I realized that without titles the poems ran together too much, but I stuck to two-word titles to keep them all quiet. Many of the titles repeat words from the poem because often the extracted word pair, as a title, pulls new meaning or significance from the phrase. That kind of underlining, and the other kinds of repetition in the book, seem like ways of tightening the screws, bringing the writer and reader into a smaller and smaller room to study these documents together. Hopefully a transaction takes place that is confidential—somehow secret, transgressive, inexpressible in any other form.

Short Conversation with Poets: Jana Prikryl

I’m using repetition in my collection, but I think (or, I’m hoping, at least) that it creates more space, instead of less.

Random things that happened today:

first, an hour or so before heading out for my run, I got another rejection email about 3 of my poems. Slowly I’m getting better at not letting it upset me. Intellectually, I know how hard it is to get something published (5% acceptance rate, roughly), and how much it’s based on fit or reader/editor preference, or some other thing out of my control. Still, it can sting, especially when I really believe in something I’ve written. Today, I’m okay.

second, RJP had to go to a textile event for her textiles class, so I went with her to the Textile Center. Wow! So inspiring and exciting to see RJP in her element and tender as I thought about my mom, a fiber artist, who would have loved coming here.

Third, I’ve known about this song ever since I saw Camp in the theater, back in 1999 (or 2000?), but I don’t think I remembered that it was a Christmas song. I guess because it has turkey in the title, I thought it was a Thanksgiving song. A video of it being performed on The Ed Sullivan Show came up this morning, and I have decided it’s the Christmas song of 2025:

dec 3/RUNSWIM

3.65 miles
trestle turn around
17 degrees / feels like 2
100% snow and ice covered

It snowed again last night. A dusting. I think we might get a lot of snow this winter. Hooray! I’m ready for winter running! Today, I didn’t like running straight into the wind at the beginning, but it wasn’t too bad and it was at my back on the way home. I liked running with the yaktrax. At first, my feet were sore, but that didn’t last long. There were a few runners, some walkers. No skiers or bikers.

Geese! A small vee in the sky, a cacophony of honks under the trestle. When I looked up to watch the geese, I admired the BLUE! sky, with only a few clouds.

Running back, I heard the tornado siren. No worries — it’s the first Wednesday of the month and that’s when they test it. One problem: it’s supposed to be tested at 1, and it was noon. Mentioned it to Scott and his suggestion: someone forgot to adjust the timer for daylight savings time.

Anything else? Near the end of my run, I enjoyed listening to the quick, sharp sound of my spiked feet piercing the snow. The sliding bench was empty. Oh — the streets looked bright silver — caused by the sun hitting the ice and snow on the road. The river was streaked with white, and not completely covered. I noticed traces of dirt on the trail where the park workers had come through to make the path less slippery — they don’t use salt because it would do damage to the river. A small thing, but evidence: of someone else here before me, the daily labor of maintaining safe (and fun) winter trails, and care for others.

Richard Siken!

I think I posted a Richard Siken! heading a few months ago, but his new book is so amazing, it’s worthy of another heading with an exclamation point. Last night, during Scott’s jazz rehearsal, I read more of I Know Some Things, including Sidewalk:

excerpt from Sidewalk/ Richard Siken

It was clear that something had happened that wasn’t going to unhappen. In the emergency room, the woman at the desk kept asking me questions. All my answers were stroke, dizzy, numb. I kept saying the words in different ways so she would understand. She didn’t. She didn’t believe me. They put me in the waiting room, which I knew was wrong, and I realized that I had messed it up because I didn’t call for an ambulance. I kept falling asleep in the waiting room. I looked much worse, slack and crooked, the two sides of my face moving at different speeds. I went back to the desk and said help. They put me in a room. No one believes that I know what I know because sometimes I miss a part or tell it sideways.

Tell it sideways. I love this idea of telling something sideways — and, as someone who does/tells things sideways a lot, I get how it can alienate you from others.

What does it mean to tell something sideways? Of course I’m thinking immediately of Emily Dickinson and tell all the truth but tell it slant, but I’m also thinking about a book I used to teach when I taught queer theory — The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways by Kathryn Bond Stockton. And I’m thinking about my peripheral vision and how see/think/imagine in its edges and not in the center.

swim: 1.25 miles
88 laps
ywca pool

It is always a wonderful day when I can swim! I felt strong and relaxed. The pool was not crowded. Everyone got their own lane — all 4 of us. There was a lifeguard on duty, which is rare. I overheard her saying to someone in the hot tub: I love going in the hot tub after a long day of giving swimming lessons! My pool friends today were the shadows. The shadow of the lane line. I liked watching what happened as the pool got deeper: at first it was straight and parallel, but soon it angled. Lots of angled shadows on the pool wall. The floor was shimmying from shadows. The blue-tiled t on the wall at the end of the lane letting you know there’s a wall, looked distorted to me. Almost like the lines at the center of an Amsler grid when I look at it.

locker room encounter

Two older women talking near my locker. Or, one woman talking at the other, speculating on the state of things, talking about bifurcated society and the haves hoarding it over the have-nots and then believing that if it compresses enough, people will fight back. The other woman, not buying it. As she left, the first woman called out, I’ll see you up there. We can sweat it out! After she left, the second woman mumbled, YOU can sweat. When I laughed she explained that she didn’t sweat easily and it was hard for her and she feels uncomfortable when she can’t and she wishes she could just sweat.

My reaction: At first — come on ladies, this is the locker room. We come here to escape and have fun and to not think about the state of things. Then, when I heard that they hadn’t worked out yet, I got it. Oh, you just haven’t worked out yet! Also: I wondered if the second woman (the woman who couldn’t sweat) enjoyed working out with the first woman (who used bifurcated and talked at her and told her they would sweat),

dec 2/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
16 degrees
75% snow-covered

Running in the snow! I love it, especially with my new Yaktrax. Bought 2 pairs at Costco yesterday. The technology of them has improved since I bought my last pair a few years ago. My old pair has coils, almost like the spiral in a spiral notebook — and unfortunately like the spiral in a spiral notebook, they can get twisted and uncoil and poke you with their sharp ends. The new version has plastic knobs with metal, so no un-spiraling. Future Sara can discover the limits of this technology after we’ve run a hundred or so miles in them.

The river was completely covered with snow and ice. Closer to the falls, it was all white, closer to home, it was more gray. The falls and the creek were still flowing.

I wore more winter layers than I probably needed. I had on my below 0 layers: 2 pairs of black running tights, 2 long-sleeved shirts — one black, one green, a purple jacket, a gray buff, a black fleece-lined cap with ear flaps, 2 pairs of gloves — black, pink and white striped, hand warmers — they’re called “Little Hotties”. I probably wouldn’t have worn the hand warmers if FWA hadn’t opened a pair for his Delia walk, but it was nice to have them.

The view of the river, the gorge, the bare trees, the other side was beautiful. The air was a satisfying and sharp cold. Even better than that though were the birds. My favorite part of the run. Tiny birds, black blurs springing up from below as I stood above the waterfall and the creek below. Movement everywhere, flitting up and down and over and out. One time, a leaf imitating a bird. Running on the path, something landed just in front of me. I thought it was a bird, but it was a dead leaf that had been lifted then dropped by the wind. Another time, a tiny bird trying to outrun me on the ground, then leap-flying, then giving up and flying away.

Standing behind the Rachel Dow Memorial Bench, I witnessed another bird land on a tree branch. I only saw it by its movement, and then when it stopped, I believed it was still there. I think I could still see it there for a moment, but I’m not sure.

echolocation, again

One more manuscript to submit — the big one — by the end of this month. Trying to add a little bit more that’s explicitly about echolocation to reinforce it as the thread that stitches it all together. Decided to look up echolocation in the OED (online through my local library, which is awesome):

1944– The location of objects by means of the echo reflected from them by a sound-signal

Coined in an article from 1944 for Science, “Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats, and Radar” by Donald R. Griffin. Was able to get a pdf of it, thanks to RJP’s access to it through school. Maybe I’ll take a phrase from it, or I’ll make an erasure out of it, or? A few minutes later: I read it; it’s short, so I’m not sure about using it. I’ll read it again while I wait for Scott to be done with jazz band rehearsal tonight.

I’m also thinking of offering definitions at the beginning of echolocation, or maybe offering them at the end. Echolocation: locating objects by their echoes / echo location: locations where echoes dwell / echolocate: the act of using echoes / echolocated: the object/subject/something that has been located by echoes