Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

The cycle of life might as well be called the cycle of death: everything that lives will die, and everything that dies will be eaten.

But the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.

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?

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.”

For them, scarcity is no different from fear of scarcity. A real threat and an imagined threat provoke the same response. I stand at the window and watch them, cataloging all the human conflicts their ferocity calls to mind.

What we call a disability they had considered a blessing: God had entrusted to the care of their community a rare treasure, and even in their art they strove to be worthy of that trust.

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.

Even before the first meteor winked at the corner of my eye, I tilted my head back and felt the whole planet spinning, and instantly I dropped to the ground and hunted for something to hold fast to before the prairie tilted and tossed me into the black void that holds this tiny blue world.

“I’m too little,” he said. “It’s too big, and I’m too little.”

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.

The doctor leaned forward and put her hand on my arm. “The best mother is a happy mother,” she said. “Give that baby a bottle.”