As I was reading the last chapters of this book, a gentle rain was falling on the colorful fallen leaves outside my home’s office window. The sound was comforting. It offered an autumn concerto as dusk’s fading light would soon turn to darkness.
Prayer and Praise Pages
A keen observer and devotee of the natural world, author Margaret Renkl in “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year” offers a series of short narratives that follow the seasons of a year. Lovingly crafted, these 52 chapters read like daily devotionals in gratitude to the plants and animals of her environs.
The text is masterfully written, nearly poetic in parts, and it has a voice that sings lyrically. Ms. Renkl’s tone is not harsh—hers is a loving and soft voice that echoes through each season in delightful ways whether she is marveling at a spider’s web laced with morning dew, or the scurry of squirrels burying acorns.
She doesn’t shy from the seemingly sinister events either like the tragedy of new fledglings taken as food for bigger birds, or the absence of toads and turtles from their yard over the years.
It’s all part of a design, often mysterious, nearly always magical, that she finds restorative and renewing. Surrendering to nature’s wisdom is often her temporary retreat from the chaos that so fills the daily headlines.
Her childhood growing up in rural Alabama was often spent exploring nearby woods and creeks along with her brother Billy. His observations of nature have taken a visual path. As an artist, it is his work that graces the pages with beautiful illustrations that so complement his sister’s triumphal text.
Interwoven in Ms. Renkl’s observations of the changing seasons and the passage of time, she reflects on her own aging, her long marriage, devoted husband, and cherished children who have grown and left to forge their own paths.
Her memories of her mother and grandmother are particularly poignant. A night-blooming cereus, which her brother has nurtured over the years has her traveling to his house to witness one of nature’s rare displays.
Changing the Light
Interfering with Mother Nature is sometimes a struggle for Ms. Renkl who wants to save all the creatures, even though she knows it’s best not to tamper. Watching baby caterpillars snatched from her parsley plant by a roving predator proved to be too much. She carefully removed the remaining caterpillar putting it in a meshed butterfly cage. There it morphed to a chrysalis and eventually to a butterfly that took flight. It was only one little life saved, but it was one that she savored.Such moments are brilliantly captured in her essays about how seasonal changes and the plants, animals, birds, and insects that thrive in those seasons can bring joy and serenity to the observer. Ms. Renkl pays deep attention to her world, and wants others to love and cherish it as much as she does; that is apparent from her graceful and entreating text.
Ms. Renkl’s writings will soothe the soul and offer readers a respite from the hurried and harried worlds that many of us choose to embrace.
There are so many caring descriptions throughout this read that are heart-rendering. Ms. Renkl is there as mentor and guide to expand the reader’s awareness of the natural world: what has been lost and what is left to celebrate and cherish.
This is a lovely book all round, particularly enhanced by the charming and well executed illustrations. It is a celebration of the natural world and our place in it shared from the heart and soul of a writer whose words ring with gentle strength and conviction.
And most reassuring is that when joy and grief have their nature’s dance hope is always a partner.
