Your Own Risk

Early Morning Barton Springs Swim Report, 10/29

A perfectly timed swim this morning: at the pool by 6:30 (sleeping in for me), swam a mile, home and sheltered just before the rain. All week it’s rained or threatened rain: Friday I stood by the side of the pool, and heard the rain patter the trees, though it didn’t get further than that. Saturday, rereading Paul Harding’s magnificent Tinkers in order to teach it, I came across the line, “There was an early January that and it had been raining all day, but just before sunset the storm clouds passed and it rained only in the trees.” Tinkers is the sort of book that comes all the way around you as you read—I love it so, and all of Paul’s work—and I wondered if I’d remembered that line, or half-remembered, when I noticed on Friday that it was raining only in the trees. It certainly is a book whose lines run through my head like music: Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but most a brush and mop drummer.

I arrived, as usual, in the dark. At first the moon pressed its cheek against a wall of cloud, but then the cloud gave way and the moon showed its whole self. No hiding its light under a bushel.

A good swim, something I don’t take for granted these sad, sad days.

Last night I told an old friend who knows birds about my goose attack. I said, “I think now I would dive down below the surface of the water.”

“They might have followed you,” she said.

That, we agreed would have been worse. Nevertheless this morning I looked up to see two Egyptian geese swimming the length of the pool a foot above the water, and I dove right down, and gave a little antianserine oath.

Sometimes Texas autumn feels like spring, by which I mean the terrible weather is over, and perhaps fairer days are ahead. Who knows what this winter will bring? Nevertheless, there are flowers by the pool.

& coliform bacteria in the water.

But a sure sign of the season: Edward Carey at the back of the New York Times Book Review, ahead of the publication (Tuesday, Halloween) and Austin launch (Monday, 10/30, at BookPeople) of his new book Edith Holler.

The old friend who knows birds was one of four former beloved former students of mine who were the fiction cohort of the New Writers Project years ago. They’re having an Austin reunion this weekend. (Another beloved student from the Michener Center is married to one of the NWP alums.) I don’t take such lovely evenings for granted in sad times, either.