One current morning, earlier than I left residence to plant white oak timber in a close-by park, I turned to Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year. As typically occurs, a passage from the New York Times columnist grounded me and pulled my imaginative and prescient ahead: “Planting a tree is a gesture of faith in the future,” writes Renkl. She continues later within the essay, “I think of what we are losing from this world and of what we will leave behind when we ourselves are lost. The trees. The stories. The people who love us and who know we love them, who will carry our love into the world after we are gone.”
These private reflections on the pure world, typically as noticed from her suburban half-acre in Nashville, abound in The Comfort of Crows and all through Renkl’s writing. Essays in her glowing 2019 debut Late Migrations provided glimpses into loss and residing as they toggled between Renkl’s previous and current throughout the Southern U.S. Her 2021 guide, Graceland, at Last, collected dozens of essays from her Times column. A handful of the essays in The Comfort of Crows appeared within the Times, too, however this guide takes a special method.
“Planting a tree is a gesture of faith in the future.”
Renkl crafted an essay for every week of the 12 months and paired them with 52 unique collages by her brother, artist Billy Renkl. For the eleventh week in winter, she makes use of a tree’s knothole as a metaphor, linking the decay of the pure world to the altering patterns of her life. She admires the greenery sprouting from the outlet and notes the house the place animals could have sheltered. It is a spot the place “radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.”
Renkl processes change and tragedy: the deaths of her ancestors, ageing, turning into an empty nester, the COVID-19 pandemic, encroaching improvement in her neighborhood and, inevitably, local weather change. Longer essays are interspersed with “praise songs,” brief poetic observations on the pure world. The guide could be learn straight by way of or stretched throughout the calendar as a weekly literary devotional. Billy Renkl’s beautiful collages present an invite to meditate, to hope, to breathe.
Infused with empathy, The Comfort of Crows reminds us to treasure the residing beings who encompass us with every breath we take. Renkl’s insights root us inside our world. “I’ll gather acorns to plant here and there at our house—in enough different places, I hope, for a few to escape the blue jays,” she writes. “With any luck, some autumn in a year I may not live to see, there will be many acorns.”
Discussion about this post