the last week

Yesterday, swimming, I thought to myself, This might be the last week for lake swims. The air was cool–9°–and for the first time, the water felt too cold. I entered it quickly, swam my 30 minutes, and when I got out, I couldn’t get warm. There was a fire in the woodstove so I sat for some time, rubbing my arms in their winter sweater. I worked outside once the sun came through the cloud, cleaning the greenhouse, picking the last tomatoes, and I never took off my sweater. This morning I’m wondering if I want to try again. Two of my children have suggested a wetsuit, they’ve even located a good one, and I’m sure they think I’m being “difficult” when I say that I don’t really want to buy equipment in order to do the thing I love. And what I love when I swim in the lake is the feeling of water on my body, against my body. I love its greeny depths, its vitality, even when it’s almost too cold. I love the silkiness of that water, how I emerge feeling polished. All good things come to an end. I’ll renew my pass for the pool and resume my slow kilometres in the lane closest to the big window. Last year I swam in the lake into October but this year will be different, I guess.

The lake has been a solace this summer, maybe more than other years. So much to think about as I swim from one group of cedars to the other. Fire, war, environmental destruction, cruelty. I think as I swim and in August, I found the words to follow those thoughts into an essay. I woke in the nights and came down to my room, switched on the little lamp on my desk, and wrote my way through my thinking. It was hard. Some nights I cried in the low light, wondering how we go on as humans, knowing what we’ve done to the earth, to each other. In the mornings, I’d enter the lake again, the green water soothing. It was like entering music. And some mornings, there was the ratchety sound of kingfishers, the eerie call of loons. Once, a family of loons swam by me, around 10 feet away, each one ducking and surfacing in no particular order.

So this fall and winter, I’ll swim in the lane nearest the window and try to find the same solace, though the man who always seems to choose the adjacent lane to dive into and perform his wild butterfly will be there, and the woman who lives near and treated a family member so terribly years ago will appear in the same colour bathing cap as mine and take up more space in my mind than she should. There won’t be wasps. There won’t be discarded towels on the sand, some of them luxurious enough to take home, wash, and claim.

It’s the last week of lake swimming, I think. Maybe I’ll go today. Maybe tomorrow. But by Thursday I’ll concede. And occasionally over the winter, I’ll want that intense cold. I’ll head down for a quick plunge, the water as surprised as I will be by our meeting.

Toni Morrison writes, All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Back to the body of earth, of flesh, back to the mouth, the throat, back to the womb, back to the heart, to its blood, back to our grief, back back back.

Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.

And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?

Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?
                                          –Natalie Diaz, “The First Water Is the Body” from Postcolonial Love Poem.