Cygnet. 6 am, June 27, 2023. See more photos of the Cygnet and Mom & Dad here.
Tag: cygnet
Walking in ‘ett ögonblick’
So it had to come. It was only a matter of time.
It’s been 1,129 consecutive (sort of, almost, consecutive) days on this morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
Yet, most recent mornings at the Park were absorbed by this little family. I scrapped the walk, ignored my step counts, and stood to watch them start their day. Are they up yet? Having breakfast? It’s been one month of cygnet posts, coincidently, one month to the day when I shared “Guess who has arrived?!?!?!”
I stopped by the nest. High tide had swamped it, and washed away all the straw that Mom and Dad had so carefully constructed for the nest.
Embers flickering, I’m inhaling smoke from the Canadian wildfires. I couldn’t find them. A mallard, yes. A scruffy gosling, yes. But no cygnet. And no swans. And all that I seemed to have left were these lines from Szilvia Molnar:
At any given moment, it was a necessity. Funny how quickly I had lost the idea of “any given moment.” Momentum implying something similar to “movement, motion, moving power” but also “alteration, change” over a “short time,” having a longer duration than “an instant,” ett ögonblick, a blink of an eye. As a puff of smoke giving in to air, I watched the moment disappear from me.
My cygnet and his parents were gone.
And, Take 14…not sure about ugly, but light, oh yes.
“I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”
— John Constable (1776 – 1837) in “Life and Letters of John Constable” by Charles Robert Leslie (Chapman and Hall, 1896). Quote is found in a letter that Constable wrote to his friend and fellow artist John Fisher in 1821. In the letter, Constable is discussing his views on landscape painting, and he argues that the artist should not be afraid to paint ugly things, because the right use of light, shade, and perspective can make even the most ordinary object beautiful. (Constable Quote via Alive on All Channels)
See more pictures from this morning’s walk of the Cygnet with Mom on FB here.
