The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
Genres: Biographies
Book Preface
Stop and look at the tangled rootlets of the poison ivy vine climbing the locust tree. Notice the way they twist around each other like plaits in a golden braid, like tendrils of seaweed washed to shore. Stop and look, but do not touch. Never, never touch, not even in winter.
Stop and ponder the skeleton of the snakeroot plant, each twig covered in tiny brown stars. The white petals, once embraced by bees, have dried to powder and now dust the forest floor, but here are the star-shaped sepals that held those fluffs of botanical celebration. Bend closer. Here and there are a few black seeds the goldfinches neglected to glean. Only a few, but enough.
Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.
Stop and consider the deep hollows of the persimmon’s bark, the way the tree has carved its own skin into neat rectangles of sturdy protection. See how the lacy lichens have found purchase in the channels, sharing space in the hollows. Tree and lichen belong to one another. Neither is causing the other any harm.
Stop and peer at the hummingbird nest, smaller than your thumb, in the crook of the farthest reach of an oak branch. Remember the whir of hummingbird wings. Remember the green flash of hummingbird light.
Stop and notice how closely the human teenagers resemble the whistling, clicking, preening starlings.
Stop and contemplate the hollow-boned ducks floating on the water like leaves. Like deadwood. Turtles, too, drift in the sunny water. See the way the bones in the turtle’s webbed foot resemble the bones in the duck’s webbed foot. Hold open your hand. Trace the outline of your fingers.
Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship.
The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away.
We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.
Contents
Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing
Winter
The Season of Sleeping
Praise Song for the Coming Budburst
First Bird
How to Catch a Fox
The Bird Feeder
The Winter Garden
Praise Song for the Praise Song of a Song Sparrow in Winter
Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down
A Seed in Darkest Winter
Praise Song for the Dog’s Marvelous Nose
Done with Waiting
It’s a Mystery
Praise Song for Mole Hands in Coyote Scat
The Crow Family
The Knothole
Wild Joy
Ephemeral
Praise Song for a Spring I Was Not Alive to See
Spring
The Season of Waking
Who Will Mourn Them When They Are Gone?
Praise Song for the Maple Tree’s First Green
The Names of Flowers
The Beautiful World beside the Broken One
Wildflowers at My Feet and Songbirds in My Trees
Praise Song for the Killdeer on the School Softball Field
Metamorphosis
Praise Song for the Alien in the Shade Garden
Hide and Seek
My Life in Mice
Praise Song for the Redbird Who Has Lost His Crest and the Skink Who Has Lost His Tail
The Bobcat Next Door
And Then There Were None
Dust to Dust
Praise Song for Solomon’s Seal
An Acolyte of Benign Neglect
Praise Song for All the Beginnings
The Grief of Lost Time
Praise Song for the Baby Chickadees
Summer
The Season of Singing
Praise Song for the Skink Who Has Gone to Ground
Thirty-Four Is Tadpoles
Praise Song for the Red Fox, Screaming in the Driveway
Loving the Unloved Animals
Pickers
Of Berries and Death
The Teeming Season
Praise Song for the Carpenter Bees Eating Our Fence to Ruin
Kept Safe in the Womb of the World
Reverse Nesting
The Spider in My Life
Praise Song for What Hides in Plain Sight
My Life in Rabbits
Praise Song for the First Red Leaf of the Black Gum Tree
Dislocation
Praise Song for the Ragged Season
The World Is a Collage
Praise Song for the Holes in Pawpaw Leaves
Imagination
Praise Song for Fingers That Do Not Form a Fist
Fall
The Season of Making Ready
Praise Song for a Clothesline in Drought
Autumn Light
Flower of Dreams
Praise Song for the Back Side of the Sign
The Last Hummingbird
The Butterfly Cage
Praise Song for Sleeping Bees
Holiness
Praise Song for Forgetfulness
Because I Can’t Stop Drinking in the Light
The Lazarus Snail
Praise Song for a Larger Home
How to Rake Leaves on a Windy Day
The Mast Year
And Now the Light Is Failing
Praise Song for Dead Leaves
Ode to a Dark Season
The Thing with Feathers
Author’s Note
Author’s Acknowledgments
Artist’s Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Artist
Newsletter – Social
| Download Ebook | Read Now | File Type | Upload Date |
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Read Now | Epub | January 17, 2024 |
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