Still Life

November 13, 2025

A few days ago, my daughter Ella took her first-ever photo of a Trumpeter swan—actually, three of them, as you can see above: two adults and their lone cygnet. She’d been trying to capture one for months, and now that they're migrating, it was finally possible. She was delighted to spot the small swan family moving gently through the mid-November grays and browns of a flooded field.

By this point in the season, most first-year birds have matured, flown off, and found their way. But the cygnet in Ella’s photo is clearly a late bloomer: still gray, not quite ready to be on his own. Every parent who looks at that image feels something hard to name: the hope that the young one will be ready soon enough to fly, the worry that he won’t be, and the quiet reassurance that, for now, he’s not alone.

Trumpeter swans are special to our family because of The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White’s tender, funny, deeply wise book about Louis, a swan born without a voice. Eventually, Louis becomes a great musician, a trumpeter whose stature befits his name. What’s always struck me about his journey is how he’s allowed to become himself. His parents don’t “fix” him. Aside from providing the materials to set him on a course—his father famously steals a trumpet—Louis works it out in his own way, on his own time.

Some young people fly early. Others stay close longer. Some wade through swamps for a long while on quests we don’t quite understand. Our job, I think, is to be like those Trumpeter parents: protective, patient, steadfast... and maybe just a little reckless, diving through metaphorical music store windows to get them what they need to begin. Then we stand back bravely and trust that the lens they’re looking through will reveal the horizon they're meant to find.

—Debra Ross, publisher

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