My Seussical Life for 2004 September 23

I just got back from swimming my laps. My shoulders and arms are really tired today, from swimming but also from lifting Atticus and Samuel to reach the basketball net at the Aquatics Center earlier this afternoon. I love swimming because of all the sounds of water and quiet. It is a very restful sport. I try to focus on things sometimes, like my form as I take strokes, or sometimes I feel how my body is pulling its weight through the water. It is a very tranquil practice. My favorite thing to do is memorize poems. This is tricky because I'm in the water. Obviously I don't have a book in front of me, but I try to have a few stanzas or such that I let run through my mind over and over. Then I can think about how the words are arranged, what the phrases mean, what images are conjured up by the poem. Tonight I was thinking of the poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider," by Walt Whitman.

This morning I picked up a pile of clothes left after morning showers when I heard a scattering, like that of a small mouse. There was no mouse, but a very large, very scary spider. Who knows how long this spider--a wolf spider--had been living in my bathroom, but he lives there no more. I caught him in a mason jar, showed him off to our neighbors, and released him into the wild (a corn field near the Aquatics Center). Atticus found all of this extremely exciting.