The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

According to birding tradition, the first bird you see on the first day of the new year sets the tone for your next twelve months.

Above the trail, the limbs of the living trees creaked in the rising wind, the kind of sound that makes your heart ache for reasons too far beyond words to explain.

The flowering trees—dogwoods and redbuds and serviceberries, crab apples and peaches and cherries—are in full splendor now, and every time it rains, the streets are paved with petals.

But the human heart can be flooded with gratitude and grief at once, and I mourn this change with a sorrow I can’t fully explain.

I can’t change Americans’ love affair with poison, and I can’t solve the problems of climate change, but I can plant a garden.

Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my own beloveds, listening to birdsong and wind in the pines?

And yet I conduct my life as though I have all the time in the world, filling my hours in ways I can’t always account for when evening falls.

Just write. Trust the words to come. If they don’t come, go for a walk.

I have to work to love September, that in-between time when the heavy heat lingers but the maple leaves have already started to turn.

From inside the air-conditioned house, the light through my windows looks the way October light is supposed to look—mild, quiet, entirely unlike the thin light of winter or the sparkling light of spring or the unrelenting light of summer. 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.

What if honoring the gift of our only life in this gorgeous world means taking time every week to slow down? To sleep? To breathe?

They are building their own lives now, and when they left home to return to them, I took myself to the woods. Because sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.