summer swimming

Listen to this. I'm a little blond girl in a tye-dyed blue one-piece dipping in and out of the pool like it's no ones business. Plunging deep into the eight feet with all that banana colored body hair going --woosh-- upon my tan skin. Mom's peering through the bay window in the kitchen and Eric's upstairs pumping Queen on the boom-box and there's nothing better than our big backyard hole with gallons and gallons of chlorinated liquid. I dive in from the edge of the deep end and I dive in from the mini-waterfall pouring from the spa. I jump into the side and swim across back and forth with no breaths. I stroke to the 3-foot shallow end, push my body down to the cement floor, and pretend to have an under-water tea party with my pinky up. I submerge my head beneath the glassy top of the pool and screammmmmm.

I can be anyone under the water. I can be a queen or a mermaid or a fish. I can be a professional diver or a synchronized swimmer or a cowgirl. I can be tall and short, bloated and thin, hearing and deaf.

But when I get out of the water and towel off enough so that I won't make a slip'n'slide of the pink tile inside Mom says I can't be a little girl with green hair.

So we go into the downstairs shower that only ghosts really use and she slivers open a can of tomato paste. The bloody insides of the aluminum cup are plopped wretchedly on my liming head. Tomato poop smears everywhere; it's in my armpits and ears, painting scary signs on the white tile walls. I squeal and cry and laugh and jiggle. This, Mom, is the goopiest, messiest, craziest situation we've ever gotten me into. She tells me to rinse and rinse and rinse some more but rinsing isn't cutting it against the red pasty paste so finally she fills a big bucket up to the brim and splashhhhhh.

Summer!

Tripping

In South Lake Tahoe watching leaves do a jiggle move outside my woody-red room. The road's taken me from

Walnut to
Ventura to
Santa Barbara to
Oakland to
Santa Cruz to
San Francisco to
Grass Valley

700 miles so far, 400 left till home.

Before this it was

Fawnskin from
Walnut from
Palomar Mountain from
San Clemente from
Hot Creak from
Yosemite from
Oakdale

Which came after

New York City

The summer started with

Las Vegas to
Zion National Park to
Bryce Canyon NP to
Lake Powell to
Fawnskin to
Walnut to
San Onofre

There are still 50 days left to go before I start my credential/masters program.

Highlights as of yet:

~Paddling up the river on surfboards in Yosemite
~A sultry day of surfing and frying in jojoba oil at Bolsa Chica
~Passion Fruit Margaritas in Greenwich Village
~Picking bloody boysenberries off the side of the highway outside of former Cowboy Capitol of World
. . .