The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship. The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away.

I think of the woman I know who looked out her window one summer and saw a rat snake climbing the pole to her nest box, heading straight for the place where the baby bluebirds were trapped. Without giving any thought to the reason why bluebirds raise as many as five clutches each year, the woman ran outside with her hedge clippers and cut that poor snake in half. I have seen a rat snake in a state of fear, and I can hardly let myself remember that story, but I remember it every time I see the little hawk slamming into the hedge where the bluebirds have taken shelter just past my own window.

The only thing to do when a Cooper’s hawk stakes out a feeder is to take the feeder down, much as it kills my heart to leave my avian neighbors unprovided for in this changing neighborhood where natural food sources have become so much less plentiful. The hawk and the owl must eat, too, I know, but I don’t wish to make their bloody work any easier. I am drawn to their fierce wildness, but this is not the kind of bird feeder I had in mind. I don’t know if I’m right to feel this way.

I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred and distrust taking over the news.

I refuse to quell this joy. It’s possible to understand what invasive species are doing to the woods and still feel the leaping heart of joy in the presence of greenness. It’s entirely possible to exult in birdsong and miniature flowers peeking out from the dead leaves of autumn. In this troubled world, it would be a crime to snuff out any flicker of happiness that somehow flames up into life. We are creatures built for joy. At the very saddest funerals, we can hear a funny story about our lost beloved, and, God help us, we laugh. We can stagger out of an appointment where a person in a white coat has given us the news we think we cannot bear to hear, and still we smile at the baby in the checkout line clapping her chubby hands at the balloons by the cash register or kicking her feet in pleasure at the sight of a stranger’s smile. This is who we are. The very best of who we are. The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets. For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway. Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world. Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is trembling into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.

But I embrace the old-timey plants that evolved to feed wildlife, the plants with names that change from place to place and people to people. And I will always insist on the homely names of my Wiregrass ancestors. It was stickywilly in the fields of Lower Alabama, and it remains stickywilly to me all these years later in Tennessee. What you call the wildflowers will tell you who you are.

Suburbia isn’t paying attention. Homeowners are still in thrall to a status symbol invented by English nobility. People enraptured with the idea of a lawn as a rolling carpet of grass, a green that remains green even during seasons when grass is supposed to be dormant, can’t help but see these homely flowers as intruders. They consider this question, if they consider it at all, as a matter of personal preference: I like wildflowers, and they like grass. But with biodiversity disappearing from every ecosystem on the planet, including our own, our preferences aren’t ethically equal. Lawns are a waste of precious water and soil because non-native landscaping like turf grass and boxwoods and crepe myrtles and Yoshino cherry trees provide little habitat or food for native wildlife.

The last time I went to an estate sale, I bought an apron my friend wore when she baked, as well as a book signed by another neighbor whose death I still mourn. I tried on the apron and thought of the time my friend first mentioned her book club, the one she had joined as a lonely young mother. When I asked her which book they were currently reading, she laughed: “Oh, honey, we haven’t read a book in fifty years.”

It was just one flower on just one ordinary day in September. It would be gone by morning, not to return for another year. Its arrival did nothing to mitigate the drought gripping the land. It did nothing to feed a native pollinator or shelter a tree frog. You could insist that it didn’t matter in any way, and I would not think to argue with you. But it was also not nothing. That night-blooming cereus brought my grandmother back to me in her halo of white hair. It brought back, too, her plum tree, long since cut down, and the feeling of red dirt between my toes. For an hour, just this once, it made me remember what it feels like when the world is exactly as it must be, and I am exactly where I belong.

In normal years, October is a month for open windows in Middle Tennessee. For cool, damp mornings. For colored leaves that quake in the wind before letting go and lifting away. For afternoon shadows so poignant they fill me with a longing I can’t even name.

Sometimes trees pop up, seemingly from nowhere, as gifts from the birds. We protect a volunteer black locust and a volunteer red mulberry as tenderly as any nursery-bought seedling. A volunteer hackberry already reaches to the power line. Soon we will run out of room at the margins and be forced to set seedlings down right in the middle of our yard, wherever there is space between the trees that are already here. The neighbor who does not like our leaves once told me we should cut down most of our trees. “They’re so thick it feels like the house can’t breathe,” she said. “That’s because it can’t,” I said. “But the trees can breathe.” That’s what I think I said, anyway. Maybe I only wanted to say it and didn’t have the nerve.