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.

But other cultures have associated the birds with intelligence and adaptability, even transformation, and these are the connections I’ll rely on as the year unfolds. I have entered my sixties now, a time of change—to my body, to my family, to the way I think about my future—and I cling to the crow’s promise of metamorphosis. What more could anyone ask from a new year than the promise—or just the hope—of renewal?

I open the trap, checking my feet to be sure I am standing far enough to the side, not blocking the door, and while I am preoccupied with my feet and the machinery of trap doors, the fox vanishes. It is not a fox. It is a blur of falling leaves, red and gold. A phantom rush of wildness. A mirage of a miracle, pungent and swift. I saw it. I did not see it. I will never see it again.

Somewhere along the way I had stopped hating winter. I fell in love with the way the peeling bark and bare limbs of the sycamore reveal a ghost tree reaching for the sky, and the way the faded beech leaves cling to their branches and rustle in the wind like dry bells. A beech tree in a winter forest gives off its own light in the same way that dogwood blossoms in springtime look like tiny ground-borne suns. I love the great horned owl’s haunting courtship song and the crows’ constant, multilayered conversation. There are good reasons not to make a habit of feeding wildlife—creatures who lose their fear of humans too often come to a bad end at the hands of fearful humans—but I do leave peanuts out for my wild neighbors before winter storms, when their survival may depend upon my help. I delight in watching the squirrels hiding their prizes under the leaf litter, and then watching the wily blue jays dig them up and carry them away to their own hidey-holes. I have come to welcome the gray, lowering skies because they mean I will have the trails at the park to myself. Who could fail to embrace a season so beautiful and so fragile?

I am learning that it is possible to want two contrary things at once. I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.

Nothing is harder to love about the natural world—or the human world—than its ceaseless brutality.

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.

I am thinking about time in both directions now—not just a future that will roll on without me, and without so many of the creatures I love, but a past I was not alive to remember.

Our favorites are the toads. You would not believe how soft a toad is to the touch—soft, soft, and so dry! Nothing like the way you’d think a toad would feel. I love the jutting toad elbows and the crouched toad knees and the splayed toad fingers and toes, all so dear, so similar to our own. We are gentle with the toads. They are as soft as a great-grandmother you can hold in your hand.

I don’t know how long it will take the tree frogs to find the nursery we’ve built for them, but I have faith they will. This faith wavers and often fades, but what else do I have to offer anymore? Faith sometimes feels like the very last thing I’ve got.

My father-in-law was born the same year as my father, but he survived Dad by close to two decades. He was my father-in-law for nearly as many years as my father was my father. Death at ninety-two should not be a surprise, but months later I can still be startled by reminders that my father-in-law is gone. At the store, I pause in the ice cream aisle before remembering that we no longer need to keep ice cream in the house to delight a loved one with so few delights left. I open the nest box to photograph the baby bluebirds, and then I remember that there is no reason to take pictures. For so long my father-in-law was too feeble to stand on tiptoe and peek into the box himself, but he always wanted to know about the baby birds.

In her eulogy, my friend reminded us of how much her father had loved to sail: “He always said that he felt at peace when sailing, where it was serene and quiet,” she said. “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?

I kept thinking about that potted holly fern, about the way my mother had pulled it from the soil of the house where I spent my last years at home, about how I carry it inside every fall and outside every spring, year after year without thinking, as though the years are nothing, as though springtime will always be waiting for me, dappling everything with light.

So much of what I do in this yard is only ever an exercise in hope.

All but a handful of our first neighbors are gone now. They have died in their own beds or gone off to die in beds that smell vaguely of bleach. No one will ever live in their houses again. One morning, after one of them leaves—for the retirement home, for the funeral home—I wake to the sound of a backhoe chewing down what’s left of their lives here: the small rooms where their babies slept; the doorways where they stood when trick-or-treaters came at Halloween and carolers came at Christmastime; the windows where they waited, worried for a teenager who had not come home.

They come for what is always called an estate sale, though the house is hardly more than a life-sized shoebox. I stop in sometimes, hoping to find a lasting memento of people whose lives overlapped with mine only circumstantially but for a long time. People who raise children together and look for lost dogs together and take time to visit in the street after supper can become friends, and their friendship is woven from many strands.

In times of fear and grief, it is tempting to assign human meaning to natural systems. How many people have told me that a loved one has returned to reassure them in the form of a mockingbird singing at midnight outside a silent house or a swallowtail butterfly lighting on a freshly carved tombstone? When the world has lost its still center, we grasp for any reminder that it is nevertheless spinning exactly as it must.

For us, too, change is almost always a source of dislocation, but if nature teaches us anything, it’s that nothing prevents the passage of time, the turning of the seasons.

I don’t tend to anthropomorphize the creatures in my yard—partly because I find their alien ways so interesting, and partly because thinking of them in human terms only makes the constant tragedies feel more tragic—but it can be hard for me not to see them as metaphors.

perhaps the reason I didn’t feel sad about the onset of fall when I was younger is only that I was younger, with my whole life still ahead. In those days my only worry was that my real life, the one I would choose for myself and live on my own terms, was taking too long to arrive. Now I understand that every day I’m given is as real as life will ever get. Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days have always been running out.

Squirrels take care in planting: digging to the right depth, covering the acorn, and patting the loose soil until it is tucked in just so. Squirrels have a prodigious memory for where they have hidden their stores, but they don’t remember them all. There are worse things, I think, than leaving a task undone. The oak forests of the world would not exist if squirrels did not lose track of acorns.

It struck me that to sit on a porch in the rainy woods is a bit like being a snail: inside and outside at once, at home in the wet world.