Sharing Sunday – Hydrosensual

Ahhh, I do love it when my persistence finally gets through. I’ve been cajoling my writer friends for pieces from them because they all have such beautiful imagination and the world needs to see what’s happening inside their brains! I have writers, poets, singers, fashion designers and so many more but they’re all terrified of sharing their work. I’m not sure why, maybe they’re trying to find their feet, but nevertheless it doesn’t deter me from cajoling them. Today’s Sharing Sunday piece is by the lovely Jan. She comes across as intimidating when you first meet her because she’s loud and exuberant but quickly you realise that is part of her charm! Her pieces that I’m sharing with all of you today, is a reflection about the hydrotherapy an old lady had to take for knees that demanded to be replaced.

Hydrosensual

The heavy silkiness of the water’s warmth slid gradually up her legs as she sloped, foot by foot, along the tiles and down the incline, clutching the silvery rail, into the hydrotherapy pool. The warmth opened her up, sinew and bone, like nothing else could. Sighing, she slid her shoulders under the warm embrace and found herself a spot by the edge. She marked her space out with a pool noodle curved in on the tiles to protect her water bottle and laminated sheets of exercises that she propped up against the bottle. The sedate and well-mannered ownership of a pool noodle depended on how many of the Chinese contingent was there at the time. Whereas the foam hand weights seemed to be a favourite with the older European men who treated the hydrotherapy pool as a place to gossip rather than actually exercise.

She actually felt like a bit of a foreigner here at Reservoir Leisure Centre, where the white Anglo-Saxons were in the minority. Secretly she rather liked this cacophony of tongues. It was easier for her to concentrate and meditate as she went through her routine, able to switch off the echoing squeals of the child hordes that splashed and cavorted in the nearby toddler’s pool. She rather liked the camaraderie of the oldies in the hydro pool too. They had started nodding hello to her after a few weeks of regular attendance.

Like most women her age she held no great pleasure in wearing a bathing costume which revealed far too much and clung, outline specific, when wet. But she had had to let go of vanity and realize that the sunspots, scars, lumps and unwanted curves were all part of ‘getting older’. Somewhere deep inside her the lithe young girl snarled at her older self for allowing this to happen. She could have done better.

These internal monologues raged around her until the soothing warmth of the water did its magic and she let go, light and weightless underwater. And her routine started. Flexing, bending, stretching: repeat 20 times. Then a few lanes in the big pool, kicking with her fins on, so much slower than she once was.

But it felt good afterwards, despite the cold change rooms, the warm shower and the war of pulling on dry clothes over damp body, which was a never-changing battle. With wet hair, freckles, age spots and no make-up she balked at the mirror’s harsh reflection.

After a while she came to realise how lucky she was to have a body that still functioned, albeit slower than before. Despite the year of terrible pain and the two total knee replacement surgeries, she had survived. Even the depression was lifting. She swam towards her future and thanked her body, despite it’s scars and lumps, for carrying around her heart and soul, her dreams and desires.

About the Dreamer

Jan is a late starting novelist in training. She is in her final semester at BWAP and plans to do Honours and then a PhD. She loves reading, writing and being a bit mad. So far she has had special mentions for her writing with The Odyssey House Inaugural Short Story Competition(2011), The Cancer Council Arts Awards/Fiction section(2012), Time To Write (2012) and has been published in ‘Inscribe’ and ‘Infusion”. So far. Jan hopes to study and write until she falls off the perch.