Getting some Exercise

Acting on my physician's orders, and fulfilling my own deepest needs, I have purchased a waterproof wallet and set out a-visiting my Island Home's many lovely beaches. I have only to wade in, get out just far enough behind the surf that I'm barely tippy-toes with the bottom in the trough of incoming waves, and lifted like a babe to his mammy's bosom at their crest. Up and down, up and down...hours at a time. All the while flexing muscles, burning calories; thinking, watching, feeling, smelling....Oceans have colors--play of light, on and through them--when you're in them, that you never see from the shore. This mid-Pacific, tropical ocean also has an odor, faint but startlingly pleasant, of something like rubb'd amber or myrtlewood, which grows stronger the longer you remain immersed, and face into the wind off the deep water. It might, of course, be only sensory deprivation, or an old memory:

.....And of pure now purer aire

Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires

Vernal delight and joy, able to drive

All sadness but despair: now gentle gales

Fanning thir odoriferous wings dispense

Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole

Those balmie spoils. As when to them who saile

Beyond the CAPE OF HOPE, and now are past

MOZAMBIC, off at Sea North-Easte windes blow

SABEAN odours from the spicie shoare

Of ARABIE the blest, with such delay

Well pleas'd they slack thir course, and many a League

Cheard with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles.