Punching in the dark

Barton Springs Early Morning Swim Report, 12/19/2024

I didn’t check the weather this morning before I left, and so set out in my lightweight surfing poncho, though it turned out to be in the low 40s. Fifteen years in Texas has made me love the cold, dammit. Few people at the pool when I arrived; then an uptick, including one swift swimmer who struck me on the flank. “Excuse me,” I said. I tipped my imaginary hat. He swam on. I did, too. On the deck when I got out I missed my vast boiled wool dress but also decided, as I so often do, that I was admirably tough.

Yesterday morning, driving down my street, I saw an animal that might have been a thin raccoon and might have been a shaggy feral cat. It turned and regarded me with glowing eyes, then ducked into the sewer. I have been on leave all semester and am contemplating my return to campus in mid January. I’m very much looking forward to it, though I also assume I might often wish to duck into a sewer.

After the swim I went to my drycleaners to drop off two items. I very much like my drycleaners; the people who work there are friendly and unfazed. I chatted a while with the woman while I emptied the pockets of an overcoat. When I got home, my Limey ball-&-chain peered at me and said, “Your nose is quite bloody.”

I was sure this was an over-reaction, but when I checked myself out in the bathroom mirror, I saw that my nose—above my nostrils, not below—was entirely covered in dried blood. I have no idea of where it came from—a little scrape? being hit in the flank and responding like a ketchup bottle?—but I thought back to the lady at the drycleaner. I was cheerfully there in an after-swim flowered coverup and wet hair and, apparently, after a fistfight. Maybe I was an athlete in a new sport, aquatic fisticuffs. She said nothing, just chatted with me and agreed that kids stow the oddest things in their overcoat pockets.

The English Department I work in sent out an Instagram post that said, “Well Wishes from the English Department.” Well.

I washed my schnoz without finding the source of the blood. A good swim, this morning, cold, clear sky but fog on top of the water like a dropped crinoline.