Octavio Solis’s Reviews > Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss > Status Update

Riches.

So many conjunctions between this book and me. And my wife too, who has lost her father and her mother already. Recipe boxes. Bluebird boxes. Boxes of ashes. All of these resonate. So much more.

So much of Margaret's childhood is startlingly different from mine, but there are just enough moments that resonate with my own youth... like turning over rocks to look for roly-polys and worms in the long, clockless summer. And feeling like the whole world is boundary-free for us kids... until we come upon the scary place. Delightful reading.

Too familiar now that we live on a farm in the rural country hills of Southern Oregon. The daily rituals of life and death that nature acts out brutally yields so much beauty still. And this lovely book honors those rituals with such lively elegant prose that veers into something more timeless. A kind of living poetry. I’m entranced by each single-page chapter.

Beautiful precise prose. A hybrid of biography and natural history. The processes of nature are beautiful but arc toward death.