The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

“I now appreciate that he enjoyed those days on the boat because the family was together without being in a hurry.” Instantly I was thinking about those Post-it notes stuck all over my house. How had I allowed myself to become so busy? How long had it been since I’d spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake? 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? A child who grew up playing in graveyards ought to grow up understanding the reach of mortality, the way it is always hurtling toward us faster than spring turns into summer on a southbound highway. Faster than a sapling becomes a shade tree and a house becomes someone else’s home. Faster than a newborn baby becomes a man. 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.