I just put my kid on the school bus for the first time, so I guess summer is more or less over. It’s cool this morning and kind of damp–feels frighteningly like autumn. However, I’m pleased to say that I didn’t waste my time this and actually made a couple new discoveries that make me feel as though I had been wasting some time prior to this summer.

First, I discovered the novels of Philip K. Dick. Seriously, how come no one told how awesome his writing is? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is darkly marvelous. He created the world of the novel within the first paragraph and then delighted me as I continued to read and learned more about that world. Great dystopian sci-fi with genuine character development. Why I never read his stuff before, I have no idea.

My other joyous discovery (or perhaps rediscovery) this summer was swimming outside. I’m an on-again, off-again swimmer. I never took swimming lessons as a kid and, in fact, was told by the ear, nose, and throat doctor not to put my head under water as a little kid due to recurring ear infections. So I never learned how to swim properly. I’ve kind of figured it out myself over the years. I used the indoor pool at college to do laps and in recent years have done laps at the YMCA pool. I’ll occasionally swim in Lake Erie, and when I lived in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, I would bike out to the beach and swim in the North Sea. Open water swimming brings with it an element of fun fear, because it does make you feel as though you are competing against the elements in a visceral way. In the North Sea, I would deliberately swim out to where my feet could no longer touch the bottom and would just hang out and tread water for a while. It helped me get rid of some of the panic that used to set in when I couldn’t touch bottom.

This summer, the kid and I bought pool passes and being a thrifty family, went often to get our money’s worth. I’ve taught her how to swim and, at five and a half, she’s old enough to make new friends at the pool, leaving me to either sit around like the other pool moms, working on my tan and doling out snacks, or I could swim laps. I’m so glad I chose the latter.

What makes swimming laps outdoors so joyous? I think it’s a combination of the clear, almost crisp quality to the water, feeling the sun on your back or doing a backstroke and feeling that you’re opening yourself to the sun and the sky, gazing at the blue above as your arms chop through the water. I love swimming the length of the pool and looking down as I go over the drop between shallow and the deep, deep end. It looks as though you’re swimming out beyond the edge of the world.

Where have these things been all my life? What other delights have I been missing? It boggles the mind.