Tag: swim

jan 6/SHOVELSWIM

shovel: 20 minutes
slushy, icy, thick snow
33 degrees

Yuck! It’s an awful mess out there on the sidewalk, the roads. After he got back from his walk I asked FWA if it was, a. doable and b. worth it to go out and shovel. He said yes to both, so I did, but now I’m wiped out and sore and not sure if it was either of those things. Looking out my window right now at the street, I am disheartened. One big soupy, slushy mess. Will more of it melt and be cleared out before it freezes again? I hope so.

A quick note about my ankle: crisis averted! The RICEing (both resting icing compressing and elevating AND playing around with acronym) must have helped. My ankle feels fine today!

Sara from 4 jan 2026 asked me to let her know if anything big and terrible happened today. Not yet (as of 4:49 pm), but there’s a lot of talk about invading Greenland and I keep seeing the headline, The Danish PM says a US invasion of Greenland will mean the end of NATO.

In other shitty news: I noticed, while clearing trying to clear the deck that a wide stretch of snow under our crab apple tree has been turned into a port-a-potty by the two rabbits who visit every night to feast on fallen apples. Very gross! Some scat here, some scat there, scat scat everywhere. The snow is glowing brown — I’ll have to try and get a picture of it, because my words can’t quite convey the color or the grossness — a picture probably can’t either.

update: I pointed out the tree/rabbit/shit situation to Scott and we agreed it wasn’t all rabbit scat and it wasn’t glowing brown. A lot of it was discarded apple bits from birds or squirrels or the bunnies and the snow beneath the tree’s wide canopy was glowing a faint orange, not brown.

swim: 1.75 loops
123 laps / 55 minutes
ywca pool

Decided to swim without stopping until Scott showed up at the end of my lane. I was hoping to go longer — distance and time. Maybe that can be next week’s goal: to get to 140 laps, which is 2 miles. I’d like to do it in 1 hour. It felt great to be swimming again.

shadows: the afternoon light coming in the window created lots of shadows on the pool floor. Today I decided that it looked less like the floor was dancing and more like it was crawling. As I swam, I suddenly thought of the line from Raiders of the Lost Ark: why does the floor move? Other memorable shadows: the lane lines on the shallow floor, then the lane lines casting a shadow at the far end, all the way up the wall, from the deep bottom to the top. Such a cool image. I liked admiring it every time I neared the far wall.

10 Pool Friends

  1. the yellow! grout between the bright blue tiles on the pool floor in the middle of each lane — I never noticed it was yellow and not white — is it, or was it just dirty?
  2. the bright blue tiles marking a cross at the end of each lane — usually I read them as black or dark navy
  3. some crud on a tile beneath me
  4. a small red chunk of something that started on the pool floor a lane over, near the spot where it slopes down, then slowly shifted down each lap — tile after tile — until it made it to the bottom and then under me in my lane — I was fascinated by this red thing and enjoyed tracking it — I prefer not knowing what it is/was
  5. a guy in black swim trunks 2 lanes over that I raced (in my head) and beat
  6. someone in fins one lane over
  7. the silver trail of bubbles that the swimmers’ fins made as they kicked
  8. a lifeguard in a BRIGHT yellow jacket
  9. a swimmer in green swimming on their back, doing some sort of reverse breaststroke
  10. a swimmer in red doing freestyle then sidestroke then walking then kicking with a kickboard

Halfway through, I swam breathing every 5 strokes and tried to think one word each time I surfaced to breathe: 1 2 3 4 5 light 1 2 3 4 5 tile 1 2 3 4 5 window 1 2 3 4 5 door 1 2 3 4 5 tree — Nothing that interesting . . . yet . . . I’ll have to keep working at it, see if I can open myself up to more words. The bigger challenge: can I remember them? Nearing the end of the swim I was getting into a groove and thinking about how swimming for almost an hour without stopping is good practice for longer runs/marathon training. I was also thinking — okay, now the fun starts — as in, I’ve swum enough today to get into a flow state, what could happen if I kept going? What doors might open for me? What wonderfully strange ideas could I have? What delightfully tiny poems could I craft? I didn’t get to find out because Scott arrived and my swim was over, which was fine for today. I’d like to experiment with this longer swim this winter, see what I can do with it.

Little House Update

A few days ago, we made it to season 3 of Little House on the Prairie. We both knew something had shifted in the wrong direction when we heard the opening theme song: season 2’s funky 70s bass line had been replaced with a cheesy swing.

The first episode guest-starred Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. It was enjoyable, but had lost some of the dark edge of realism that we enjoyed in seasons 1 and 2. Episode 2 was the beginning of evil Nellie, which is camp-tastically awesome, but lacks a grounding in a real time and place. It was exaggerated and over-dramatic, shifting the story away from the lives of people trying to not die in the unforgiving frontier of the 1870s, to an epic battle between the flawed and feisty goodness of Laura and the pure, irredeemable evil of Nellie Oleson. Nellie and her twisted, unhinged glare. Nellie silent and still, lurking at the window. Nellie and her old-fashioned temper tantrums, one on the bed, wailing and squealing and pounding her fists into her pillow; another pacing the room, shrieking and breaking porcelain dolls on the wall, smashing an expensive dollhouse with a hammer on the floor. I do find Nellie’s antics to be entertaining, and get some pleasure in loathing Mrs. Oleson, but I miss the quieter, darker depictions of the difficult frontier life that we witnessed in seasons 1 and 2.

After Little House we’ve been watching an episode of Love Boat from season 1. We’re enjoying it. Such a contrast to Little House. It makes me want to watch the whole line-up from a 70s evening.* I’ll have to ask Scott what that would be; as a kid he memorized the tv guide and probably remembers exactly what was on and when. That would be a fun and enlightening project, to revisit the 70s values/perspectives/preoccupations represented in prime-time tv that we were both raised on.

*perhaps the more accurate recreating of our early kid viewing experience of these shows would be to figure out the reruns that ran back-to-back on TBS.

Wow, this entry went on a ramble! Before ending it, I’ll just add that I have been shocked by how relevant the themes in Little House are right now. Yes, I have problems with the show — too much God-talk and not enough discussion of what it means to live on stolen land less than 2 decades after the civil war — but the hope and resistance and the desire for social justice of the 70s shapes these stories in ways that I had forgotten ever existed (because: Reagan). I am resisting the urge to devote an hour or more to offering specific examples of what I mean here. I don’t have time today.

jan 2/SWIM

1.75 loops
1 hour / 127 laps
ywca pool

The first swim of the year! I started it out of sorts — leaky, fogged-up goggles; leaky nose plug; a stiff neck. But I kept going, lap after lap, and somewhere in the middle it got a little easier. Hovered around 1:40 pace for the whole swim, which didn’t feel hard, but also didn’t feel too easy or slow. Shared a lane with an older man in a red speedo. When I asked him if I could share a lane with him he said (jokingly, I think) as long as you behave!

vision note: As usual, I tried very hard to check the lane for another swimmer. I looked 3 or 4 times — I stared. I thought it was clear, so I got in. Nope, a swimmer. Luckily, I act as if there’s a swimmer there that I can’t see, so it’s not a problem that I couldn’t see him.

Pool friends: another older man in a speedo who was a good swimmer — he liked to do dolphin kick on his back, deep under the water; a woman in a green and black suit, also good, doing a steady freestyle; 4 or 5 other swimmers with bright pink, open water swim caps; 1 or 2 bits of fuzz; shimmering shadows on the pool floor; 2 lifeguards in bright red swim shorts.

locker room encounter:

An older woman sitting on the bench, wiping down her wet snow boots. Another women arriving, Shirley wears her boots when she does yoga, so you can, too. (I’m assuming that the first woman forgot her shoes for yoga class and was trying to figure out if she could wear her boots in class — did she?)

dec 23/SWIM

1.5 loops
100 laps
ywca pool

Swimming! For almost 10 years, I’ve been swimming with a nose plug, after picking up an allergy during open swim one year. Today, I wondered what would happen if I swam without it. I lasted 200 yards, then put it back on. My nose felt tingly and irritated from the chlorine. Hopefully it won’t close up tonight. My favorite pool friends were the bright patches of light with their prism of color streaming in from the windows. Other friends: a few fuzzy-somethings, some crud on a tile, the slightly shaking shadow of the lane line, a woman a few lanes down swimming fast and using hand paddles, another woman in the next lane using a kick board, a guy with a pool noodle, several people in dark full-body swim suits, hanging out in the far lane — standing, first evenly spaced down the length of the lane, then huddled together at one end. The recreation pool and the slide were open, so I noticed kids climbing up the slide steps for much of my swim.

locker room encounters

  • an older woman with a young kid. The woman had her suit pulled up, with the straps down. The kid asked why she didn’t pull her suit up all the way. The woman —because I have to go the bathroom and I’m lazy. (I do this too)
  • another older woman in a pale blue swim suit, muttering oh, then stopping in the middle of the room, fishing in a bag and pulling out flip flops

blind spot

For the second night in a row, I woke up, got out of bed, stretched, then had an idea for my blind spot experiment. It was inspired by reading the last text box I did before I stopped yesterday:

One glance to shoot down the albatross / Two glances to hold back the landscape at the river´s edge / Three glances to turn the girl into a kite / Four glances to hold down the train that falls into the abyss / Five glances to relight the stars blown out by the hurricane / Six glances to prevent the birth of the aquatic child / Seven glances to prolong the life of the bride / Eight glances to turn the sea into sky / Nine glances to make the trees of the wood dance / Ten glances to see the beauty that shows up between a dream and a catastrophe / What is the difference between a glance and a glimpse? To glance to glimpse to study to stare to look to see to ? The best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of a landscape, is to sit down before it and read, or become otherwise absorbed in thought; for then, when your eyes happen to be attracted to the landscape, you seem to catch Nature unawares, and see her before she has time to change her aspect. The effect lasts but for a single instant, and passes away almost as soon as you are conscious of it; but it is real, for that moment. It is as if you could overhear and understand what the trees are whispering to one another; as if you caught a glimpse of a face unveiled, which veils itself from every willful glance. The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.

note: the second half of this passage is a quotation from Nathaniel Hawthorne, which I posted and discussed on 20 august 2022

I typed up some notes which don’t totally make sense this morning, but here’s the gist: the key: landscape. Playing around with/disrupting the idea of seeing land as capturing it, owning it with a glance. Add in pastoral poems, like the one by Forrest Gander. How we see a scene, where scene = the land. Also: glance versus glimpse

See 13 april 2021 for a discussion of Forrest Gander’s “Pastoral” — the idea of seeing/scene emerging fully formed versus the work of seeing and processing and making sense of half-formed images

See also, 10 october 2025 for a review of past entries/poems discussing the pastoral

Writing and reviewing all of this, I am again thinking about my blind spot in terms of the gorge — the gap, openness, a gash, a space like JJJJJerome Ellis’ clearing.

dec 19/SWIM

1.5 loops
101 laps
ywca pool

Another swim! Today the pool was not that crowded, and by the time I was done, it was almost empty. Then, after Scott and I got out of the hot tub, it was completely empty. I almost wanted to get in and swim some more. I probably would have if we didn’t need to go shopping. Scott commented on how calm and still it was.

The swim felt good — mostly. At the beginning, a little harder to breathe, but as I warmed up, it got easier. The woman next to me also had an open swim club cap on; I would have said something to her, but I was afraid I was seeing it wrong. She was a strong, slow swimmer. She swam freestyle with some snorkeling and breaststroke mixed in. Many new friends in the other lane: first, someone in black swim trunks, kicking furiously as they swam freestyle for a 50, then stopping, then breaststroke, then a break. They lasted 5 or 10 minutes. Next was someone in an orange suit, doing a slanted breaststroke. After them another fast-ish freestyler. My favorite friend: the shadows dancing on the pool floor. Everything looked almost animated — like a cartoon, not quite real, and also hyper-real.

Continuous 200s again. A ladder of 50s: breathing 2/3/4/5/6/7/6/5/4/3. A set of continuous 100s, with the second fifty faster and more kicking — a 6 beat kick?

In the hot tub, I asked Scott if he wanted to increase his mileage to make his workout longer, so that I could swim longer. I’d like to increase my average per workout from 1.5 to 2 loops/miles. He said yes! I need to figure out some fun writing/attention/imagining/thinking experiments as I swim for January.

This past Tuesday, during the community jazz band rehearsal in which I don’t play, I read more of Jana Prikyl’s Midwood. Some of it I like, much of it I don’t understand, which could mean I need to read it several more times, or that I just don’t like it. Here’s a poem I copied into my plague notebook that spoke to me immediately.

Another Visit/ Jana Prikyl

A flock of Boy Scouts dispersing early morning
from the summits down into the valley
while I looked from the window of another
visit to that city, considering the bus routes
I’d sew together along the rim of the hills
and the park tucked under the shoulder of a slope
I mean to see but never do, made of transparencies
that dropped their leaves on top of leaves
description falls, it’s there without me

dec 14/SWIM!

1.5 loops
100 laps
outside: -5 degrees

I swam 3 times this week! Scott and I decided to go early, before the water aerobics class. For almost the entire swim, I had the lane to myself. In the last 5 minutes, a woman (I think) I shared a lane with earlier in the week joined me. I did my usual swim of continuous 200s, broken up by breathing, but I added a twist in the middle: for a 600, or maybe an 800?, I swam faster and kicked harder on the even 50s (when I was breathing every 4 and 6 strokes). It felt fun to go faster.

Today’s pool friends: shimmying shadows on the pool floor, making everything look strange and off-kilter; the older woman in the pale blue suit who is not particularly fast, but is a strong swimmer; a guy in black trunks who was also a strong swimmer; a guy in olive green shorts walking and stretching the length of the shallow end; my squeaky nose plug; a guy in black shorts with a belt on, aqua jogging in the deep end. No fuzz or unsettling floating things.

I tried to think about my echolocation hybrid piece, but I struggled to keep a thought in my head. Instead I counted strokes, and noticed other people, and turned off most of my conscious thought.

Earlier this morning, I quarried another Emily Dickinson poem: We Grow Accustomed to the Dark:

one syllable: We grow Dark when light put holds lamp Her step night then fit meet road those brain not moon sign star come out grope hit tree in but They learn see sight life straight

two syllable: away neighbor witness goodbye moment newness vision erect larger evenings disclose within bravest  little sometimes forehead either darkenss alters something adjusts itself midnight almost

three syllable: accustomed uncertain directly

my poem:

Brain alters —

gropes the Dark,
hits lamp light,

and meets night
directly.
Away moon!
Away stars!
Goodbye sight.
The moment
adjusts — they
learn larger
uncertainties,
witness newness
within, fit
vision into
the almost,
then meet the
evening erect,
but not straight.

The other day, I came across a powerful poem by Pat Parker on poems.com. Wow!

excerpt from One Thanksgiving Day/ Pat Parker

One Thanksgiving Day
Priscilla Ford
got into her
Lincoln Continental
drove to Virginia Street
in downtown Reno
and ran over thirty people.
Six of them died.

One Thanksgiving Day
Priscilla Fordgot into her
Lincoln Continental
drove to Virginia Street
in downtown Reno
and ran over thirty people.
Six of them died.

. . .

Priscilla Ford
got into her
Lincoln Continental
drove to Virginia Street
in downtown Reno
and ran over thirty people.
Six of them died
and now Priscilla Fordwill die.
The state of Nevada
has judged
that it is
not crazy
for Black folks
to kill white folks
with their cars.
Priscilla Ford
will be
the second woman
executed in Nevada’s history.
it’s her highest
finish in life.

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 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 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),

nov 25/SWIM

1.5 loops
100 laps
ywca pool

Another great swim, another 1.5 loops to add to my tally of loops swum in 2025! The pool wasn’t too crowded. At one point, I was the only one in the water. When another swimmer arrived, she called out, we’ve got the whole pool to ourselves! I noticed the shadows on the pool floor flickering. A swimmer next to me, in a black t-shirt and green with a blue pattern, or blue with a green pattern, swam some freestyle, some breaststroke for the deeper part of the lap, then aqua jogged in the more shallow part. There was another male swimmer on the other side of him, swimming freestyle. At first I thought he was fast, and that it might be fun to race (in my head), but he turned out not to be fast enough to make it fun.

I wasn’t planning to, but I decided to do 2 sets of faster 200s: 3 x 200 on 3 min, with 30 sec rest. By decide I mean, the idea of swimming a faster 200 with the clock popped into my head early in my swim, so I did it. As I swam I thought, I should turn this into a set of 3. Then, in the last of the 3 I thought, I should do an easier 800 then do the set again. There was never really a plan, and even though I did choose to do it, I didn’t really; it just happened. As I swam, I thought about how it might help me mentally — specifically for endurance, but also for overall well-being — to add some harder swimming sets this winter instead of only moderate and steady lap after lap.

Anything else about the swim: as always, I saw orange everywhere. No fuzzy friends, I recall staring down at the drain and recalling how past Saras would imagine, only in a fearful flash, that Jaws would pop out of it. I lost track of my laps during a 200 and thought about how ridiculous it is that I can get off track just counting 8 laps — my miscounting today was not my first rodeo (the first time I remember hearing this delightful phrase was when my PT was letting me know that my kneecap had probably suffered a subluxation many times).

a draft almost done

The goal: be finished with this manuscript before the end of 2025. A thought this morning as I read through it and reflect on echolocation: it’s all about locating and being located in this place, in time and space. That locating involves:

  1. being the someone that makes sounds that will bounce off something else to create an echo, and the someone that listens for echoes made by others to locate something
  2. being the something that is located/placed/found
  3. being the echo that is created by one subject’s sound being received by another subject

Always, three. Immediately, I ‘m thinking about my poem, “An Exchange on the Winchell Trail” which involves a walker, a runner, and the You (in thank you/you’re welcome) that passes between them. And then I’m thinking about a line in my poem, “Everything”:

trinity: a baby owl in the hollow of a tree, the woman who points it out, the girl who stops to look

other threes: rock, river, air / girl, ghost, gorge / triple chants — 3 beats / grandfather, mother, daughter

Another think I’m working through: the little poems in which I take the words of another — mostly poets — and fit them into the form of my breathing pattern: 1 2 3 breathe / 1 2 breathe. The original name: form fitters. Can I think of a better one? Breaths? Breathing (with?) [author’s name]?

during the swim

Every so often, as I swam, I thought about naming my form fitters, “breathing with . . .”. I wondered if I should use only the poet’s first name, as a way to indicate more familiarity. Later after the swim, I mentioned it to RJP, and she thought “Breathing with Emily” sounded a little cheesy. I guess I agree and am thinking that “Breathing with Emily Dickinson” sounds better. Does it?