WHEN THEY CAME, WHEN THEY GO

Ana Maria Spagna

I remember the day I first saw them, though I can’t say when it was. Did they arrive the year snow buried our windows sill to beam? Or the year pipes froze while we skied in nine-degree sun? Did they suddenly appear while we were packing a trail up the driveway to welcome the family for New Years? Maybe it was the year schoolkids wrote about lighthouses or from the perspective of a bear? The year of the Christmas Carol or the mid-winter flood? The year we burned rotty fir or skied to North Fork to shovel the bridge? Yes, but wasn’t that every year?

The day I first saw them, I was driving to the post office on some urgent errand. (A library book, I’m guessing.) The lake sat still and near oil-black. Snow on the flats gray-white as the sky. No snow on the road, but some on the rocks. Trees on the slopes near-black too. A dark day getting darker at two thirty. (Yes, but wasn’t that every day?) I was in a hurry when Judy Clark flagged me down. I did not want to stop, but Judy insisted. She had a telescope aimed across the lake, toward Weaver Point, and I bent my eye to the lens, and Judy focused the view. There they were!

They’d been there before, but I hadn’t known. White blobs in the distance could be floating ice chunks or a snowflake on my lash. Blink and they’d be gone. Over-worry your mail and miss them entirely, but this time I saw: long-necked and regal, or bobbing comically, tail feathers to the sky. Swans! Swans! Six of them or eight. Later there’d be more. Later they’d come close, loiter near the shore, mingle with the buffleheads, the golden eyes, the coots, like old pals, and I’d never (rarely) fail to slow down to see. And to count. I’d ask everyone, anyone:

How many did you see? 38, 45, 57. More than 60?

They returned year after year, some of them juveniles, dirty gray, not nearly as ugly as the fairy tale claims. Through shock and awe, Starband and Hughes, fires in the forests and floods over the road. When friends coughed too hard, when buildings toppled, and even after the float plane drowned us all in sorrow, so much sorrow—

How many did you see? 25, 43, 61. Last fall: 84!

—and then the tigers lilies bloomed, and the nephews leapt off the one-mile dock screaming glee or terror (all of us did!) and sledded too fast down the gravel pit hills, and we shoveled the bridge (until it collapsed…) and emptied the woodshed and waited for library books to arrive.

Such beauty! Such delight!

When time comes for them to leave each spring, they take practice laps over the mud flats. They’re out of shape for the long flight. They circle past the eagle nest snags and the Painted Rocks then right overhead: enormous and flapping, squawking, honking, what a racket: glee or terror or exertion or hope. Then they land on the water. Then they practice again. You never know when they’ll go. Circle once, circle twice, then one day: up, up, and away. I asked:

Has anyone seen them go?

No one has, though we all think someone has, and some have seen them in high in the sky, almost over McGregor—“noisy as ever, but way up there”—and we all know this much: Sometimes when they leave, a swan or two stays behind. Too weak to make the trip? Too stubborn? Lazy, independent-minded? They stay for a while, then at some point, they circle up and up