Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.”

Blessed are the parents whose final words on leaving—the house, the car, the least consequential phone call—are always “I love you.” They will leave behind children who are lost and still found, broken and, somehow, still whole.

My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.

Every day the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world. In the stir of too much motion: Hold still. Be quiet. Listen.

By the time I reached them on the sand, they were smiling. No tragedy had touched us, no catastrophe but the near loss I still carry—the shadow that, even now, I cannot set down.

I saved all these things. But what I couldn’t save weighs on my heart like a stone.

Human beings are creatures made for joy.

And yet I sometimes let myself imagine what a gift it would be to start all over again with this man, with these children, to go back to the beginning and feel less restless this time, less eager to hurry my babies along.

If there’s anything that living in a family has taught me, it’s that we belong to one another. Outward and outward and outward, in ripples that extend in either direction, we belong to one another. And also to this green and gorgeous world.