If you’re looking for a good book to read on a cold wet February day, you couldn’t find one better than The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, by Margaret Renkl.
It’s about the grief, joy, and hope inherent in aging, her family, and observing the lives of the plants and animals in her half-acre natural yard in Nashville. Her writing is enhanced by knowledge gleaned from a lifetime of observation, and most of the native species she lyrically describes are native here in Arkansas as well.
Of some chickweed, observed growing inside a tree’s knothole on a rainy February day, she writes: “Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble, radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.”