The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

Immersing myself in the natural world of my own backyard—or the nearby parks and greenways, or the woods surrounding our friends’ cabin on the Cumberland Plateau—is the way I cope with whatever I think I cannot bear.

Unlike my sons, I am not ready to move past the past, but I am ready for something different, too, something new and urgent and thrumming with blood and sap and life. I am learning that it is possible to want two contrary things at once. I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.

Far above the ground, a hole made by decay in a living tree had become a cold frame, a natural greenhouse that let in light and kept out frost. Life in death in life.

Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.

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.

The world does not proceed according to our plans. The world is an old dog, following us around the kitchen with its eyes. The world understands us. We understand nothing, control less.

We, too, will live. In the morning we will wake and rejoice, for we are once more among the living.

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. Perhaps it’s somehow related to all the other losses surrounding me.

The way death and life mingle and tangle, like the passion vine that twines among the blackberry canes in my pollinator garden—it’s always been like that. Or maybe it’s only death itself that comes as a shock, a giant rent in the tightly woven shroud we wear without noticing for all our days, no matter how many or how few we are given.

Precious, irreplaceable things pass away, often in a paroxysm of suffering, but life is stubborn, life is undeterred, and for every ending there are a thousand, a million beginnings.