Looking Glass

My daughter swims. She swims in bracingly cold water, in the ocean when she’s here, but mostly in rivers and lakes in Britain. She glides through looking-glass surfaces and emerges renewed and invigorated. Often, she is with a friend, and they will sit on the shore afterward, having a beer, then ride their bicycles back home to continue being moms and wives and working women. But they have these watery spaces in time that are theirs entirely, and among the many things about my daughter that make me proud, this, oddly, is a big one. I just think there is something defiant and magnificent about it.

My son-in-law wonders if I am impressed by it mostly because I myself cannot swim — it’s a skill I have never achieved, and an experience I can never know, so maybe I make more of it than I should. But this cold, wild swimming goes deeper than that. It’s indicative of a kind of spirit, I think.

My daughter, modest as always, declares that her proclivity for entering water is completely unsurprising. “Unlike you, Mom,” she explains, “I grew up in California with a father who taught me early on to pack a swimsuit no matter where we were going, and that getting into the water is a fundamental part of experiencing the world.”