swans

The trumpeter swans flew over our old farmhouse every evening about twilight. Honk-honk they talked, and they flew so low you could hear the wind going through their wing feathers. They would spend the day out in the Skagit flats, and then come home to their roosts on Barney Lake, just down the hill from our little farm .................. I would often be outside in the dimming light, chopping wood or fixing the fences, and then I would hear the swans calling --- the call of the Nookachamps -- for we lived in the watershed of that tributary. The Nookachamps River flowed out of the Cascade foothills and joined the mighty Skagit ......................................................................That was our home -- 3325 Martin Road on forty acres of brush and second growth timber, with a barn that once held a dozen dairy cows, back when you could run a dairy with a dozen cows, and some ten acres of badly overgrown pasture................................ There was a tender cedar grove out in the field, right where the old well used to be. A tender grove of young trees -- because the old behemoths -- the ancient cedars -- had been cut down by our fathers and grandfathers -- cut down to build the barns and the houses we lived in. So the new tender cedars were growing again...............................................New growth will become old growth, I said, and it only takes a thousand years or so -- just leave it be .............................. I used to walk down to that grove and it smelled so very, very good, all young and green................................. Yeah, there were some good parts about that farm ...................................................