Eight swans a'swimming

Eight swans on the pond as I was driving to work yesterday. They are striking, all pure white against the yellows, oranges and bronze of the lily pads and alders lining the pond. Two flights of Canada geese passed overhead in Anchorage, too. 

Migrating birds are on the move and that means winter is chasing them south. It is a strange fall so far, Lots of color up country and in toward Anchorage but around the house, all the trees are still very green. That is late. It holds me up, too, because I wanted to used the leaves to mulch the garden, which by the way still has plenty of colorful flowers in it. There is very little, if any, new snow -- Termination Dust -- on the mountains. Last year there was some in July and usually it shows up sometime mid to late August. No wonder I have no big drive to do firewood. It all adds up to winter coming late this year after the unusually warm summer.

Things are changing for the newer solitary man. I drove by one day and his van was gone, so I figured he went on south for the winter. But next day I noticed he had just moved back a little behind the tree line. So maybe he was planning to stay. Then next day he was gone. But farther along there he was pulled into a paved pullout near the salmon stream. 

A police car was parked next to him and my guess was he got chased out of his last parking place. Then a day later he had pulled off into a narrow space at roadside. A day later he had moved again, this time to a wider pullout and he has been there ever since, his bicycle standing in front of the van and smoke coming from the chimney. Over the course of the summer he has moved from place to place from near the river bridge back toward Anchorage until he’s now just two miles from the highway. I still have had only one glance at him that day when he was wearing the mosquito net. Somehow this one doesn’t generate the empathy of the first one. I hope that fellow is still around and doing well and I am just missing him because my schedule changed and his didn’t.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out -- the warm summer leading into a late fall and how winter will be, and, too, how this van-loading solitary man weathers it all.

But some things never change … looked around when I saw the swans but, nope, no one.