I swam alone yesterday and this morning, mine the only footsteps in sand, mine the only arms windmilling between the trees I use as markers. Although it’s only August 18, the season feels late. The weather has changed, the hot days cooling, rain arriving in the tumble of dark clouds. This morning’s loon sounded forlorn somehow. Alone.
The other day just one swallow swooped as I swam. Not a violet-green–they’ve already flown south. But I think that one was a barn swallow, grey-blue on top, the underparts pale russet. This morning there were many of them, flying high, and then low over the water. At one point there were six directly around me, hovering, then darting away so quickly they disappeared into the atmosphere.
I’ve been thinking as I swim, mostly about the final copyedits of my forthcoming book, The Art of Looking Back: A Painter, An Obsession, and Reclaiming the Gaze. There was one particular and vexing issue that I was being stubborn about but the other day I sort of let it go, with some good advice from my husband. (I am sort of old-school about punctuation, even for section headings, which apparently work better without.) I felt lighter this morning as I stroked back and forth between trees, the swallows over me and around me. Thinking about the drama in the book, how long ago it was, and yet how writing about it, reading about it, brought back the complicated tangle of emotions, good ones and sad ones. In my house, there are paintings and drawings to remind me.
He drew me once with my third child. He drew on rough paper that began to deteriorate almost at once. He made a copy and brought it when he came for a visit. It’s on the wall outside my study and I see it every time I come in to work at my desk. When he brought it, I almost forgot the difficult weeks, the letters, the pressure, the insistent pronouncements of love. Look at my strong arms, the drapery of my clothes, the soft curl of my hair down my back, like water in motion.
Look at my hands.
This drawing is on the wall by my study door and I see it, oh, ten times a day. The heading for this section is a quote from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.
Thinking and swimming. The two are perfect companions. And this morning my companions were barn swallows hovering over me, perhaps seeing me as a bird trying to fly, mistaking my backstroke for panic, my arms for wings.
...Theresa Kishkan 