about 1.5 miles (2550 yards)
ywca pool
Woke up to flurries, then a steady snow. 2-4 inches possible. I would have run in it, but I had already run 5.6 mile yesterday and planned to go to the y to swim this morning. How wonderful it was to be in the water! Made me feel good, so much better than before! After my swim, Scott and I soaked in the hot tub. We both agreed, it’s nice returning to routines that we used to do 4 or 5 years ago. I also like being around happy, older woman in the locker room. I’m not usually talking to them, but I like hearing their chatter post-workout. Joyful, relaxed, pleased to have moved their bodies. I want to be one of those old women one day. I want it even more knowing that it’s not guaranteed. My mom didn’t make it. Scott’s mom didn’t make it, either.
Did my usual swim, broken up by 200s — breathe ever 3/4/5/6. Didn’t have my nose plug on quite right and with the first few flip turns, my nose and then my head burned. Ouch. The water was cloudier today than it had been last week. Saw at least one thing floating in the water, a few marks or spots or bits of something on the bottom. Shared a lane with an older woman for the first few minutes. She did sidestroke and breaststroke and backstroke. A guy in the next lane (was it the same guy as last week?) was running to the edge of the deeper end, then swimming freestyle or breaststroke. At one point, he sped along underwater, parallel to the bottom, kicking furiously.
Colors I Noticed:
- the red swim trunks of the guy swimming in the next lane
- lots of orange — an orange sign on the pool deck, my orange bay, some other orange things
- a swimmer in a pale blue and green suit
- deep blue tiles on the bottom of the pool
- someone in a black suit, walking along the pool deck
I tried to think about a form for my vision poems that I’d like to use, but I’m not sure how: the Ishihara colorblind plates. The ones that are a circle with colored dots and a number embedded in the center in a different color. Maybe a year before I was diagnosed, I looked at one of these and couldn’t see the number. It was my first clearcut indication that something was strange about my vision. I remember crying — not from sadness, but relief. I wasn’t making it up. There was something wrong with me! Of course, at that moment, I had no idea that what was wrong with me was that all my cone cells were dying. Anyway, I tried to think about the plate as form as I swam, but I keep getting distracted. I want to use this form, but I don’t know how or even if I could do it with my limited design skills. I’ll keep thinking about it and maybe I’ll figure it out.
Before I swam, early this morning, I thought about color and not being able to see it, or being able to see it sometimes, and usually strangely. I found a documentary by Oliver Sacks: Island of the Colorblind
Do I mind that my colors are strange or wrong or not always there? Not too much. Often, I don’t realize I’m not seeing color.
Here’s part of a gray poem I found last week. The entire thing is amazing, and better read on Poetry Foundation site with all the proper spacing. I’m posting a excerpt from it because I like the way color appears in it. Is it almost like slashes and flashes?
from Grayed In/ Martha Collins
2
Cloud on cloud, gray
on gray, snow fallen
on snow, tree on tree
on unleafed tree—
only a river silvered
with thin ice and a slash
of gold in the late gray sky.
3
Grayed snow slush trudge but
snow falling coating filling
in for absence Present!
child with stringed mittens
here to take her place
to take over on
snow showing up air
4
White sky, whiter sun brushing
trees with tints of red, then
in the distance streaking
mauve gold, filling in
between the now filagreed
trees, silhouettes against
the now red burning sky.