To Swim... It is Magic.

This summer, like most summers, has been filled with some very high highs and some very low lows. Perhaps the highest high for me is the rediscovery of my love of swimming.

I only ever swam competitively for one year -- my senior year of high school -- but by participating in that solitary season, I learned a lot about myself. Mostly, I learned that I'd rather race the clock than other swimmers. Ha!

Even though I was only a member of my high school swim team for one year, I developed a pretty solid relationship with my coach Beth. I saw her today at the pool and she sang my praises -- "Hannah's a swimmer! And she writes! And she's a phenomenal artist! My son owns one of her octopuses!" -- to the women with whom she was speaking. It was incredibly kind and it made me feel like a million bucks, and as I swam today, the thing I thought about most was how very much swimming inspires my art.

And that, not surprisingly, lead me to thinking about the effect swimming had on my novel Like A Flip Turn.

In the opening chapter of Flip Turn, Jenny narrates...

To clear my head, I swim. An abundance of words is what usually swarms there, buzzing about and ricocheting off the inner walls of my skull, but with each additional lap, it’s numbers that tend to occupy more and more of the space. For the most part, I count laps. A constant record of how many I’ve already swum and how many more I intend to complete runs circles in my brain.

This is so true of my own thoughts. I recently shared with someone (my other mother Amy, I think) that swimming laps is probably the closest I've ever come to meditation. My brain just doesn't turn off, ever, but when I swim, I can get to a point where pretty much the only thing I'm doing is counting.

Jenny also shares...

Eventually, though, I do pull myself onto the warm cement. I toss my goggles onto the ground beside me and sit there, feet dangling in the coolness, studying the way that a pool of glistening water is able to manipulate the lines of my legs. Refraction prevents things from connecting like they ought to; my waterself is slightly different than my landself.

I've always liked that description because water really and truly does alter a person's shape. I've always felt that I can do things in the water that I can't do on land... simply because my waterself has powers that my landself lacks.

Here's one more of Jenny's observations:

I end up swimming farther than a mile, because even when my arms feel like overcooked spaghetti and my burning lungs threaten to burst, leaving the pool is never something to which I look forward. I’m taller when I’m in the water, and stronger.

On land, I’m just like anybody else.

I'm relatively certain those lines can be appreciated by any athlete in any sport, because when you're doing something that you enjoy and which makes you feel good, it's inevitable that you're going to want to push yourself just... a little... bit... farther. You're going to want to stay in the pool or on the court/field/track just... a little... bit... longer.

And last but not least, I need to include the conversation Jenny has with one of her favorite students, Sam Finley, who is also a swimmer. For those who love freestyle, I think you'll appreciate this excerpt. Jenny asks, "What's your favorite part about swimming?" and Sam responds,

“The water-pocket glistens.”

His answer is immediate; no thought is required.

“The what?”

He grins and repeats, “The water-pocket glistens. That’s what I call them, anyway. It’s when you take a breath during freestyle, and the arm on the side that you’re breathing flings little droplets of water—like rain—that catch the sun and glisten. I watch through that triangle pocket my elbow forms as my hand dives back into the water. It’s better in an outdoor pool because the water-pocket glistens shimmer more and the noise is more tingle-splashy than echoey, which is how an indoor pool makes everything sound.”

I close my eyes, visualize his words. I can see the image exactly.

The summer that I wrote Like A Flip Turn, I was more aware of the water-pocket glistens than ever before, but when I swam at my friend Theresa's outdoor pool earlier this week, there they still were, just where they've always been: in that triangle pocket formed by my elbow. I noticed it every time I took a breath.

After such a supreme summer of swimming, I’m anticipating an autumn of art... but I guess we'll just have to see where life leads me, huh?