Early Morning Swim.

This year, instead of swimming late in the evening like I have in years past, I’ve been doing early morning swims.  There is nothing I don’t like about early morning swims, actually.  The only part that’s challenging is the getting out of bed part of it.

I lure myself with the promise of sluicing through the water, that feeling where the water is actually warmer than the air outside of the pool.  I never know if it’s going to be a dewy morning, the type that leaves drops of water on the flowers and spider webs… I love those types of mornings.  Sometimes some of the flowers are still sleeping from the night, just barely opening as I make my wake back home.  Sometimes a bird or two will come sit at the side of the pool, or up on the fence.  It’s like finding presents from nature all over the place.

It’s rare, but sometimes I have an interesting sky as the sun rises higher and higher, too.  I really appreciate mornings like that, but often I’ll get one morning like that and the next morning the sun just comes up and there’s nothing all that spectacular about it, except that’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

Maybe one day I’ll keep a waterproof camera on the side of the pool to take pictures of the cloud formations above me while I do my backstrokes.   This morning, for example, I saw a teddy bear with his arms crossed over his chest giving himself a hug, then I looked a few laps later and a sly fox laughing had taken form, and then a few minutes later an enormous Great Dane was running as he looked sideways at the Earth.  All in the clouds.