Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

Margaret Renkl's memoir is a collection of brief, interleaved essays that braid together two threads: the story of her Southern family across four generations and close observations of the natural world in and around her suburban Nashville yard. Rather than following strict chronology, the book moves between past and present, alternating family vignettes with nature meditations that echo and illuminate each other. Several essays are transcribed oral histories in the voice of Renkl's grandmother Mimi.

The family narrative begins in 1931 with the birth of Renkl's mother, Olivia, in Lower Alabama. Mimi recounts not realizing she was in labor, mistaking contractions for a stomachache from canning peaches. Another of Mimi's stories describes a fire around 1936 that destroyed the family's barn and house, forcing the family to move in with Renkl's great-grandparents, Papa Doc and Mama Alice. When Mama Alice died, Papa Doc sat on the porch staring at the rosebushes and died barely a month later.

Alongside these origin stories, Renkl describes her efforts to attract bluebirds to a nest box outside her Nashville office window. One year a wren and a snake destroyed all the eggs; another year, four bluebird babies safely fledged, but later a wren took over the same box and killed a chickadee nestling. These nature essays establish a pattern that runs through the entire book: Cycles of predation and renewal in the yard mirror cycles of love and loss in the family.

Renkl was born in 1961 and struggled to breathe after birth. Family photographs show her parents, grandparents, and great-grandmother gathered around her, willing each breath; she calls them "the universe." Her early childhood in Lower Alabama is shaped by rural freedom but also by her mother's worsening depression. Lists of things the young Renkl knew and did not know at age six reveal a child's limited understanding: She knew a blue pill helped her crying mother sleep but did not know the hospital in Montgomery was where mothers who could not stop crying went for help. Her mother later explains that electroconvulsive therapy "took all those memories away" (38), erasing her memories of Renkl's infancy.

Vivid scenes accumulate: sitting with her father in a doorway during thunderstorms, feeling rain on her toes and warmth from his body; sleeping in her grandparents' attic, terrified of an enormous fan and listening to her weeping mother being driven away into the night. The essay "Swept Away" describes sweeping a sidewalk and triggering memories that lead Renkl to Eola, the Black woman who worked for her grandparents for a dollar a day and who may actually have been the one to teach her to sweep.

In 1968, the family moved to Birmingham. Renkl identified three things that can return her instantly to Lower Alabama: a red dirt road, the smell of pine needles, and the call of a blue jay. In a grocery store, she sounded out the words on a children's book and realized she was reading; her mother, despite having almost no money, bought the book. During the Vietnam era, she sat at her father's feet watching news anchor Walter Cronkite report casualty counts and became convinced her brother Billy would be sent to war.

Essays on adolescence revealed her parents' complicated but enduring marriage. Renkl watched them dancing in the living room on a Tuesday afternoon, embarrassed by an intimacy she could not name. She later discovered honeymoon photographs revealing a vibrant romantic life her mother never discussed and realized her parents delayed having children so they could keep dancing. A series of family deaths in the late 1970s marked the onset of accumulated grief. Renkl's grandfather Max collapsed on the threshold of his house in 1977, moments after seeing the recliner Mimi had bought as his Christmas gift. They buried him on Christmas Eve.

Renkl's young adulthood was marked by failed attempts to leave the South. In 1984, she entered a doctoral program in Philadelphia but was devastated by homesickness and alienation. Her father told her by phone she could always come back: "Even if you marry a bastard, you can always leave him and come on home" (118). Her former Latin teacher later advised her to pursue a writing degree with her brother in South Carolina. There she recovered through encounters with the natural world, and one night in 1986, she and a man in her graduate program kissed on a park bench until near dawn. He became her husband.

Marriage and motherhood in Nashville brought both joy and echoes of her mother's experience. After the birth of her first son in 1992, Renkl had postpartum depression. When she asked her mother why she gave up her career, the answer was immediate and bitter: Alabama law forced mothers of young children to resign from state employment. This revelation reframed Renkl's understanding of her mother's lifelong frustration. Her middle son's reckoning with mortality at age three, triggered by a dead robin, produced escalating questions ending with "I will die? I will be dead?" (141).

Renkl's father's terminal cancer forms the book's central grief. He underwent chemotherapy every other Wednesday, followed by 12-day recovery stays at Renkl's Nashville home. When he asked to take the grandchildren to the circus, Renkl refused, exhausted, but eventually relented. On the day the cancer was declared metastatic, she picked up a breast self-exam card in the oncology hallway, discovered a lump, and spent more than a year convinced she was dying before understanding she was grieving. The night her father died, she lay beside him holding his hand, silently begging each gasping breath to be the last. She missed the final breath because she turned to the window, wondering when light would come.

Her mother's widowhood unfolded in surprising ways. Never a reader, she checked out Pride and Prejudice from the library after falling in love with the BBC adaptation and became voracious. Four days before her sudden death, she told a nurse, "I'm not afraid of dying. . . . My husband died nine years ago, and every night I tell God I'm ready to see him again" (164). She died without warning, returning in a black box of ashes sealed with a twist tie. Two weeks after the funeral, her mother's dachshund ran away; Renkl found the dog at her dead mother's back door, scratching so frantically the paint had chipped from the doorjamb.

For years, the siblings could not resolve where to bury their parents' ashes. Renkl's mother had refused to disclose the location of her father's ashes, finally revealing they were in a guest room closet. In 2017, the three siblings traveled to the family cemetery in Lower Alabama with the posthole digger their mother had specified. The red-sand soil yielded easily, confirming she still knew the texture of her homeland's earth. They each dropped a handful of dirt into the hole while mockingbirds sang, burying their parents between the church where Olivia was baptized and the schoolhouse where she learned to read.

Caregiving continued when Renkl's husband's parents moved to an assisted-living facility near their Nashville home. When her beloved mother-in-law died, Renkl reflected that her lost parents and mother-in-law had formed a membrane through which she now saw everything differently.

Throughout these losses, nature essays on resilience run parallel. A Dr. Van Fleet rambling rose, first ordered by Renkl's great-grandfather in 1910 and propagated through four generations, contracted an incurable virus and had to be destroyed, but a forgotten potted cutting survived and bloomed at age 107. A monarch caterpillar Renkl fears is dead turns out to be molting, splitting its old skin and crawling away renewed. One November afternoon, she walked to the mailbox and found monarch after monarch gathering nectar from her late-blooming zinnias, part of a late migration to Mexico. She resolved to plant zinnias every year.

The book's closing essays address grief directly: It is not something to find closure from but a second skin that changes imperceptibly over time. In the final essay, on the morning after her mother's death, someone left muffins, coffee, and cream at the back door. When Renkl poured cream into her cup, it erupted into swirling patterns. She understands then that the world goes on: Somewhere someone is hearing good news, someone is welcoming a new life, someone is crying out in gratitude.