Last night I sat with a friend out on the lake near my childhood home. The moon sat almost full →[More:] in a horseshoe nook made by the treeline where the lake tapers up to the quiet stream that feeds it. Now and then a fat hungry bass leapt after a low-flying bug and slapped against the moon's reflection in the placid water.

Suddenly our conversation, half laughs and good times, half about what really matters, was interrupted by a trumpet warming up across the lake, blaring and splashing an echo across the quiet like a chuckle.

When the sound came a second time we looked across the lake where two white shapes glided, illuminated by the moonlight, along the far shore. Another laughing, honking mess blared, and then another, trumpeter swans in full voice.

As we passed the pipe and talked about hard work and separation from the ones we love and laughed about crazy dogs and crazier kids, the trumpets would periodically tune up and crack us up from afar, until we noticed a dozen or so Canada geese swimming straight at us with some urgency, and our thoughts turned to speculation as to how close behind these geese the swans would be.

Our suspicions were borne out as two swans and their cygnet swam five feet from us, chuckling softly as they passed into the neck of the lake where the geese were cornered, and set up a cacaphony as the male chased the geese out of the water and onto the grassy shore, then circled back to his mate and bobbed heads with her for a moment while the little one followed along.

Then the swan family swam around a bend in the shoreline and out of sight, though we could hear their traffic far into the distance.

Here comes my nephew! Gotta go.