Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

by Margaret Renkl

The alien does not know it’s an alien.

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?

School will be reinvented every year, an astonishment every year. Where were the nuns all hiding while we were walking barefoot on the hot concrete?

It was years before I understood that I was never safe, not even there.

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.

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

The cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all—not the still soil nor the clattering branches nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and I too will grow cold, and all my line. Never mind. Mind only this tree in winter and this redbird, this tiny god, all fiery light leading to him and gathered in him, this lord of the sunset, this greeter of the coming dark.

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.

But our tales, even the most tragic ones, hinge on specificity. The story of one drowned Syrian boy washed up in the surf keeps us awake at night with grief. The story of four million refugees streaming out of Syria seems more like a math problem.

Every day the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world.

The fog comes on little cat feet, as everyone knows, but the fog does not sit on silent haunches except in poems. In the world, the fog is busy. It hides stalking cat and scratching sparrow alike.

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. In the fairy tale we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift. What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place.

Oh, the lives we grieve in their going. Oh, the lives we grieve in their going on.

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.