I Go Swimming Every Day
And now it is cold and I still go
The summer of 2020 should have been one of the worst of my life. But it has turned out to be one of the best, because I go swimming every day in a beautiful reservoir.
T thinks “beautiful reservoir” is an oxymoron. “Ugh, it’s hideous,” he has said every time we happen to go together. He hates the fact it is unnatural, created by a dam, and is often full of motorboats and people, churning it all up, making it cloudy.
The edges of the lake are rough and irregular, like wholesome wheat bread cut with a dull knife, or old, hard lumpy brown sugar. When the lake gets low, and it is low right now, tree stumps and sandbars emerge. But I don’t really ever see the less attractive parts of the reservoir, which we who swim in it just call a lake. I just see the water, and the water is clean, and blue. From my vantage point, with my eyes just a few inches above its surface, I just see the cottonwoods winking on the shore, and above that, the pine-covered hills. I have learned a million times what all the different pines are called, I can’t keep them all straight.
Previous summers, I went to this lake just once or twice a week. But this summer something wonderful happened; a guy who lives in our neighborhood got completely wasted and sideswiped my car, so it was in the shop for a…
