CASCO BAY, MAINE ? We are on the porch when the five huge white birds come gliding across the cove and into our peripheral vision. A quintet of migrants, a small flotilla of tundra swans, is traveling elegantly our way.

Suddenly our newspapers, with their ominous tales of woe in Pakistan and India and their warnings of terrorists in the homeland, are tossed aside. We leap for the binoculars and head to the shore to see swans Swans! making their first appearance to our audience.

“What are they doing here?” we ask each other. Jokes abound. Maybe it’s too crowded on Martha’s Vineyard this year. Maybe they read the turnpike signs that say: “Maine, the way life should be” and decided to give it a try.

We stand there quietly transfixed by creatures who have chosen our cove as a hospitable way station on their astonishing 3,500-mile journey. And for a time, we lap around the edges of something close to peace of mind.

Peace of mind? It’s nine months into this war, or what is called war, or what feels only intermittently like war. We have come here for an early serving of peace and quiet. But watching these visitors, I wonder: Is the peace here as deceptive as the surface serenity of the swans? Or is nature the real world, untouched by our transient fear and human conflicts?

A few days ago, Washington announced yet another set of terrorist warnings, as alarming as they were amorphous. That same day, we hovered like parents over four exquisite jade blue eggs in a nest that the catbird built dangerously close to the house steps.

Another day brought another car bombing in Israel. But the mackerel were running and we came home elated for a victory dinner.

On a cloudy morning when Pakistan and India were daring each other to the brink of nuclear war, I planted the garden. Ten days later, when the two countries retreated ever so slightly from mutual disaster, the arugula sprouted.

Now, another suspected terrorist is in custody and the headlines shout of “dirty bombs.” But we stand joyfully still watching the tundra swans who pay no mind to borders in the disputatious world they fly over twice a year.

What a strange war. A stranger home front. The first hours, days, weeks of high anxiety have receded, only to roll in again on waves of scares anthrax, smallpox, dirty bombs, mininukes, alerts of many colors.

I may never again see a plane fly over a city skyscraper without registering some small tic of worry. I have trouble imagining the “normal” that we can go back to. I have equal trouble imagining life on endless high alert or imagining anxiety as my central vision.

Peace comes back to mind. But does planting the garden, tending the children, caring about the fragility of bird eggs, planning for the future, keep us in a state of denial or keep us rooted in reality? Should we spend life prepared for the worst? Or be unprepared?

A new poll tells us that even in New York, people are fearful but upbeat about the future of their city. Is there then a human set point of worry that people ratchet back down to? Or is our default position really self-deception?

Of course, the color-coded alerts that come from the government don’t tell us what to do. In the fall, the government asked only that we shop; in the spring it asks us to spy. But no one says how you should live each day in a war without a front line or a defined enemy, without a map or a V-Day.

So I wonder now how we will live against the new background hum. Will it be like the people of my Cold War childhood who built nuclear bomb shelters for the doomsday that never came? Or like the cloistered Finzi-Continis in the classic movie who paid no attention to the outside world, tending their own garden until the Nazis stomped in with jackboots?

A few months ago, I found letters from my father, stationed stateside in World War II. He wrote to friends overseas, giving them both the war news and updates on toddlers tossing orange-juice grenades. I wonder how he lived with this duality? Life goes on. Was his domestic news reassuring or insulting to his pals?

As for us? I don’t know if we will remember this season as one of wide-eyed hysteria or one of foolish myopia.

For the moment, anxieties and swans both float freely across my line of vision. Then at last, our tundra tourists are scared by kayaks or curiosity and take wing. As we hold our breath, the five of them turn and head out over the cove to a neighboring island named (honestly) Hope.