The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
By Margaret Renkl
Spiegel and Grau, 2023
Hardcover: $32.00
Genre: Nature, Memoir, Essays
Reviewed by Edward Journey
In 1998, when I took a job in Jackson, Mississippi, I moved into an apartment in a suburban neighborhood in north Jackson. When I told a new co-worker where I lived, she scowled – “Oh, you live around the corner from that awful house where they don’t keep their yard up. It’s overgrown and full of recycled trash. It’s a disgrace.” Of course, I had to find that yard as soon as I left the office. It was a contrast with the neighbors’, but I found it charming. Over time, I found out it was the home and garden of Felder Rushing, an influential and noted gardener whose articles I had enjoyed in Horticulture magazine over the years.
Reading Margaret Renkl’s new book, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, I can imagine her Nashville neighbors, with their well-manicured and pesticide-controlled (“poisoned,” Renkl would say) lawns, commenting on her free-wheeling property with the dismay of my Jackson colleague. Renkl, who contributes a weekly opinion essay for The New York Times, previously published the books Graceland, at Last and Great Migrations. She’s a Birmingham native with family roots in “Lower Alabama,” a graduate of Auburn and the University of South Carolina, and a long-time resident of Nashville.
The Comfort of Crows contains fifty-two essays and interspersed “Praise Songs” that begin on the first week of winter (“The Season of Sleeping”) and traverse a year in seasons. The final essay, “The Thing with Feathers,” carries the subtitle “Fall – Week 13” so the book provides a year in the life of a conscious environmentalist, using the natural world to enhance and inform a tumultuous human-made environment. The essays are illustrated beautifully by Margaret Renkl’s brother, artist Billy Renkl. For fans of books in print, the book is a beautiful object. The quality of the essays and art makes it special. Renkl is a worthy successor to the cherished Verlyn Klinkenborg meditations on “The Rural Life” in The New York Times that appeared until 2013.
“We were never cast out of Eden,” Renkl writes in an introduction, “We merely turned from it and shut our eyes.” She directs the reader’s attention to the things around us that we either take for granted or overlook completely as she ponders lessons from nature and lessons from life. Renkl advises immersing oneself in the natural world as a coping mechanism in a troubled world: “To follow politics these days is to court bewilderment, denial, complete despair … Immersing myself in the natural world of my own backyard – is the way I cope with whatever I think I cannot bear.”
Her comfort comes from watching the wildlife in the natural world obliviously going about their daily routines, adapting to the curveballs society tosses at them. She finds inspiration in crows, foxes, wildflowers, bobcats, hummingbirds, wild mushrooms, and her dog, Rascal. After reading this book, I am more comfortable with the crows that occasionally crowd the backyard bird feeders. In “Loving the Unloved Animals,” Renkl provides a gushing tribute to the overlooked merits of the opossum, vulture, mosquito, spider, wasp, and red bat.
Nature is not Renkl’s only concern, of course, although it accentuates most of her other concerns. The Comfort of Crows deals with aging and loss, grown children leaving home (and returning during the pandemic), and urban sprawl. The essay “Kept Safe in the Womb of the World” offers insight into the author’s writing methodology. “The Spider in My Life” describes the elaborate spider web and worm composter that adorn her writing table.
Renkl tries to accommodate nature while allowing it to take its course. She has a healthy acceptance of death in nature and understands the mortality rate of baby birds. Nevertheless, as a well-meaning human, she feels guilt when she tries to interfere to be helpful and she feels guilt when she leaves it alone. Discovering a dead baby rabbit, she tucks it into the brush pile, “where some hungry thing will eat it.”
The Comfort of Crows captures the distinct character of each season, even as climate change messes with the timing of things. There are evocative passages about staying up late to catch the rare blooming of a night-blooming cereus, the risky temptations of poke salat, and the significance of the first bird spotted on New Year’s Day. “How to Rake Leaves on a Windy Day” captures the rapture of a simple timeless activity. One longs to find the friends’ cabin at the Lost Cove on the Cumberland Plateau where the author and her husband, Haywood, take refuge. The spiritual element of nature is explored in the essay “Holiness,” in which Renkl, stopping to listen to the sound of a lone cricket, finds its song “as beautiful and as heart-lifting as any hymn.” The twenty-six “Praise Songs” are spiritual meditations in their own right.
At one point, Renkl writes, “Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days have always been running out.” With that understanding, Renkl has resolved to cherish and do the most with the time she’s given. Her new book is a testament to that commitment and a challenge to readers to be conscious of the world around them – starting with their own backyards. The Comfort of Crows is a comfort to read.
Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).
