Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss Hardcover – July 9, 2019

It is a gift when a writer brings a new perspective to a challenge we have faced since the dawn of human life — the challenge of loss in the face of love and the grief that follows. Margaret Renkl offers us a new perspective in “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss” a collection of short essays and nearly poetic writing that move around the issue looking for a new way in.Renkl explores both the world outside her home, filled with rat snakes, bees, and her beloved birds, and ties it into the loss of her own parents. She ties all this together, stating the obvious in new ways that connect life and death in a natural context, but not diminishing the impact. “The shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is love’s own twin” (7).Her description of the natural world is centered around her own backyard in Tennessee, something that most of us can relate to easier than the wilderness explorer. In the chapter, “Late Migration,” Renkl tells us about her desire to attract monarch butterflies. She notes there were once over a billion monarch butterflies in North America, and now there are less than 100 million. “Once upon a time, even a loss of that magnitude might have caused me only a flicker of concern, the kind of thing I trusted scientists to straighten out. But I am old enough now to have buried many of my loved ones, and loss is too often something I can do nothing about.”Since she can do something about this problem, she plants a garden to attract monarch butterflies. Although they do not come at first, a later migrating group comes at the end of summer. She notes that monarchs migrate like birds, but it takes four to five generations of butterflies to make it. No single butterfly makes the entire migration. The natural world follows its own path.Her love of the natural world around her reminds her of the fragility of life and the cruelty of the world. But knowing that death is part of a natural cycle does not make it easier to address. In “After the Fall,” a single powerful page addressing grief and offering hope, Renkl writes about grief:“This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through. Of closure. It’s all nonsense.Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.”Grief changes people. But change is not always bad and with time those changes create a different person who can still live.“What I mean is, time offers your old self a new shape. What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new ruined you. You are both, and you will always be both. There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walkout into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year’s leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall” (281).Part of that new person is the memories that we carry with us. Memories become unreliable for accuracy as we move on. “All these images are absolutely clear, but I know better than to trust them. I have turned them over so often the edges have become soft and worn, their contours wholly unreliable” (98). While our memories do change, I only see them as becoming unreliable in their factual accuracy. We begin to alter those memories so they become true to our experiences more than the facts. Truth is not always found in the facts.Renkl’s short essays reflect a range of writing styles. From natural descriptions to what can best be described as prose poetry (e.g. “Redbird, Sundown), making this a fascinating read. She even includes an essay called “The Imperfect-Family Beatitudes” that offers a humorous look at families and ends with an exhortation to tell your children you love them every time you leave them.Renkl is an outstanding writer who has published in a number of publications, especially the New York Times, but this is her first book. After the success of this book, we can hope to see more come from her. It is a rare voice that can address grief and yet offer hope.“Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being. In the fairy tale, we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift.What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place” (186).Renkl excels at finding that unexpected light in the darkness. As a result, she has added an indispensable volume to the library of grief, loss, and love.

In 8th grade the author, Ms. Renkl, shared with her parents that she really didn't want to be a veterinarian; they bought her an old Underwood typewriter. She subsequently wrote all her high school and college papers on this old-fashioned, reliable word-generator. Additionally, she also wrote a thousand poems. p 114 and p.230The title "Late Migrations' refers, hopefully, to the pattern of wildlife that faithfully returns each season to enrich our lives, and do all the hard work that needs doing to keep our complex ecosystem functioning, and robust, for generations.The author wrote the book in her late fifties, and her work is blooming, becoming a classic much as Georgia O'Keefe's paintings of nature created her most moving work, late in her life. p.229In her brief, poetic essays Ms. Renkl weaves nature and family together in a pattern that defies science, but is perfectly comprehensible when readers look at life as a beautiful, interconnected tapestry. In an interview she specifically states that " The nature essays are family essays." p. 237A lot of people in the North, East and West of these United States shrug their shoulders at the idea that literature, poetry, music and civil behavior actually thrive in the Deep South. There is a suspicion that it's a politically backwards area. The author, however, resides in Nashville, the heart of Great Music, and is a weekly contributor to the New York Times.In a world that, to some, appear lost in a movement that no longer honors deep family traditions and ties, Margaret Renkl and writes powerfully and personally about the joys and griefs that accompany raising children, taking care of elderly parents, and making what used to be called "a home."She writes well, truly well, but the most endearing in her poetic prose is the many quotes she shares, from memory, and from conversations transcribed from tapes she and her brother, Billy Renkl, made with their extended family over several generations.In one essay titled " Every time We Say Goodbye" sung by Ella Fitzgerald, she describes her parents dancing deep in rural Alabama: " My mother is barefoot. My father is wearing his work shoes, but my mother's toes are in no danger. These steps are as familiar to them as their own heartbeats." p.72In "All Birds" she painfully teaches her little boy that, "Yes, all birds die?" And, as is always the case with the little people we call our children: "All mommies die?" And, finally: "I will die?" he said, his voice quavering. "I will be dead?" p. 140-1More than half of the 200 pages long collection of essays spanning the years 1931-2018 are rooted in the observations and reflections she has nurtured while working in her home office in Nashville, Tennessee through her windows into her half acre backyard. One of the last essays carries the book's title "Late Migrations." She writes about the increasing absence of the beautiful Monarch butterfly; few of us may know that "it takes the monarch four generations, sometimes five, to make the full round-trip from Mexico to their northern breeding grounds and back." Some us may know that there used to be a plentiful one billion monarch butterflies in North America. Now there are only ninety-three million.'Margaret Renkl has a deep sense that something is in the process of going terribly wrong, because butterflies and bees are disappearing. She wonders what we are doing with our pesticides; so she plants "clover" in her suburban garden in Nashville, Tennessee, hoping the honey bees will find her home, and her backyard.In Prairie Lights she echoes the Danish Story Teller, Hans Christian Andersen, when she quotes a little boy to come out of the car to watch the stars: "I am too little, " he said. "It's too big, and I am too little." p.93Margaret Renkle's essays, illustrated by her brother, Billy Renkl, would make an excellent, safe family and small group go-to 'shared-talk' book. Somehow we have come to a place where we may need to talk about how to keep our families and our nature safe-for generations to come.

I'm sure this novel begs the question why did I pick it up? It was this semester's author in residence selection. My entire MFA group read it and let me tell you it's not my kind of novel. I would not have picked it up on my own, but I'm glad I read it. It is memoir/creative nonfiction and it really explores life. It’s and it's one of those novels that as you go through life you see yourself reflected in many of the stories with similar but different experiences. I know the one that stuck out the most was the spreading of the parent’s ashes. That's that spoke to me. I'm going to give it four stars and recommend that you give it a try. It's hard to say it's a great read because of this or a great read because of that selection. Like poetry each little flash memoir will speak differently to different people.

Another book club book. Written well. Very sad tale. What is wrong with these book clubs that only have depressing books on their lists. Quit this one andJoined another one

I love, love, love this book. I read her every week in NYT. She's my kind of broad.

Beautiful writing, weaving of natural world and her own life moments. Short chapters that did not hurry or bore. Made me want to pick it up and slowly savor it.

The essays in this book are all interconnected, and each offers windows into love, the passage of time and loss.I loved her use of language, and the extraordinary insights she takes from nature and applies to everyday life.