Although the narrative of The Comfort of Crows unfolds within the span of a single year, this book actually took several years to write. During that time, my life changed in some of the ways a human life almost inevitably will. My children grew up. The last of my elders died. I grew older myself. Much of what happens within the human realm—the emptying nest, the building of a stock-tank pond, and so on—took place during 2022, and I write about those events in the present tense. When I refer to human events that happened earlier than that, I have used the past tense.
That’s not true for the essays that describe only the life unfolding in my backyard or in the woods surrounding the cabin on the bluff. I experience my own life as a linear narrative, as days pile upon days, but I experience the life of the natural world as a repeating pattern. Though written during different years, these are observations of nature in all its repetitions, unwinding according to the rhythm of the ages. Songbirds build nests; baby birds grow up (or don’t); trees bud and then bloom; blossoms ripen into berries. Creatures from many branches of Earth’s family tree arrive to feed on them all. From one year to the next, the wheel of life turns, and then turns again.
Nevertheless, it is a calamitous mistake in the Anthropocene to trust that flowers blooming in springtime and birds singing at dawn are a sign that all is right with the natural world. In truth, very little is right with the natural world, even on my half-acre lot in Tennessee. Every year now, animals and plants respond in heartbreaking ways to the devastation wrought by climate change, to the heedless growth of a burgeoning city. Winter is punctuated by warm spells that aren’t due for months. Droughts burden every summer, and so do brutal flooding rains, a marriage of contradictions that belies everything we once knew about the seasons. These changes, too, repeat from year to year, but this pattern is not a wheel. It is Yeats’s widening gyre. Its center cannot hold.
I rejoice in what is eternal, even as I force myself to face what is not, to let my heart be broken again and again and again. The very least I owe my wild neighbors is a willingness to witness their struggle, to compensate for their losses in every way I can, and to speak on their behalf about all the ways I can’t. It is my dearest hope that you will do the same for your own wild neighbors. Rejoice and grieve. Do your best to help. Bear witness when you can’t. Remember the crows, who tell us that we belong to one another, and to them.