Worthy Witness

Luke and OJ and I have adventures.  Doesn’t everyone with a two and a half-year old grandson and pug have them?  We start out just after Luke’s Mom or Dad leaves, hustling around the house to find my shoes, unearth the car keys, and packing a snack and water.  We often include carrots that all of us like, including the horses,  just in case we visit the stables.

In the hills of Litchfield, we are five minutes from two lakes, a placid river, 4,000 acres of protected forestland with trails and a fantastic museum for naturalists, which we are, all three.  A little further down the road are the stables, two of them, a farm with chickens, pigs, sheep and cattle from Africa.  There are other farms we visit, but none so picturesque as this.  We hike the year round and use walking sticks bleached from the waters of Cape Cod, another favorite place.

One day in May, we took a trail less travelled and found an isolated pond with swans.  Luke said that it was the Mommy and Daddy.  I should have believed him.  Ever the photo journalist, with my Canon 500 around my neck, I secured OJ to a tree, and sat Luke on a rock, near enough to see but away from the marsh land I walked into with my zoom engaged.

Only one swan seemed interested in what we were doing and was swimming towards us.  A second or two of shooting was enough to raise goosebumps when I realized the bird was moving far too fast to be friendly.  Perhaps we disrupted a mating or there was a young one to protect, I thought as I turned tail.  The swan was just beyond the bull rushes with the next stop being shore.

I swooped up Luke and untethered OJ who had not barked at all.  Running down the gravel path to the safety of our car, Luke was weightless in my arms and OJ led the way, sensing my alarm.  As I secured Luke into his car seat, he asked why the swan didn’t have any eyes.    I couldn’t answer.  We went home so that I could look up his question and download the pictures.  We learned that the swan’s eyes are the same color as their beaks, and are barely discerned in the black hood, a protective measure.  The swan could have attacked us that day, but the stars were in alignment to protect us; a typical day with Mimi.