Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

People want to believe that something extraordinary has happened to them, that they have been singled out for grace, and who am I to rob them of one sheen of enchantment still available in the first-ring suburbs?

That hot land is a part of me, as fundamental to my shaping as a family member, and I would have remembered its precise features with an ache of homesickness even if I had never seen it again.

It took a lot of nerve for someone so ignorant of true wilderness to fashion herself as a nature writer, but the flip side of ignorance is astonishment, and I am good at astonishment.

I treasure these glimpses of the exotic, this sense of having traveled to distant lands, and hearing, however briefly, their strange, foreign songs.

knowing where to look is not the same thing as seeing what you’re looking for.

It is a glimpse into eternity, that bewildering notion of endless time, where light and dark exist simultaneously.

How foolish it is for a mortal being to need such reminders, but oh how much easier it is to pay attention when the world beckons, when the world holds out its cupped hands and says, “Lean close. Look at this!”

The loss you don’t know about is no less a loss, but it costs you nothing and so it causes you no pain.

For beauty, what tidy window ever matched a spider’s web glistening in the lamplight?

Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.

Caring for elders is like parenting toddlers—there’s a scan running in the background of every thought and every act, a scan that’s tuned to possible trouble. And there’s no way to shut it down when the worst trouble, irrecoverable trouble, comes.

Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.

What I mean is, time offers your old self a new shape. What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you. You are both, and you will always be both.