“I will catch the fox, or I won’t, but never again will I be free to walk away forever.”

Each of the interactions Renkl describes leaves an impression on her. She may or may not catch the fox, she points out, but the memory of the fox stays with her. This speaks to the theme of Bearing Witness to Ordinary Beauty as Environmental Stewardship. The natural world defies conventional thinking in the most awe-inspiring manner possible. Renkl can’t just walk away from such power.

“Year by year, the creatures who share this yard have been teaching me the value of an untidy garden.”

Renkl narrates The Comfort of Crows in an authoritative voice. While she may be educating her audience, she presents herself as a student of the natural world. She learned the benefit of an untidy garden from the creatures themselves. Renkl doesn’t limit her learning to books or human knowledge; ironically for a writer, she encourages her audience to accept education from a world beyond writing.

“At heart, most people are good.”

Renkl often criticizes human activity, particularly modern materialistic and destructive behaviors. However, this criticism has an optimistic foundation. Renkl believes that, deep down, most people are “good.” This guiding principle helps her retain hope, even as she finds fault in the human world. Her book becomes an effort to reach these people, to speak to their inherent goodness about what must change and what must be preserved.

“I am learning that it is possible to want two contrary things at once. I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.”

Renkl’s book is inherently predicated on change. The book’s structure is based on the passage of time; to move from one chapter to the next is to experience a changing season. However, by writing about her memories, Renkl secures her nostalgic past for posterity. The inherent contradiction she refers to between everything or nothing changing fuels her writing, as she describes how much everything changes and has already changed to encourage people to preserve and conserve. Everything people do must change for everything in the natural order to remain the same.

“Some days I’m one headline away from becoming Lear, raging into the storm.”

Throughout the book, Renkl compares herself to Shakespeare’s King Lear. She sympathizes with Lear’s raging at his powerlessness in the face of time and aging. This literary reference mirrors Renkl’s use of natural allegory; she recognizes herself in the human and natural worlds alike, blurring the boundaries between these two spheres by incorporating references to both.

“In summer they will all be gone.”

The final paragraph of this chapter contextualizes the effort that Renkl pours into documenting the frogs’ plight. This great struggle is fleeting: By summer, she writes, the frogs (and the predators) will be gone. However, this doesn’t undermine Renkl’s efforts. Posterity isn’t the only motivation in her world. Instead, these natural cycles and struggles are meaningful because they’re so fleeting; after all, they’re part of a large natural system of life and death. The frogs will be gone by the summer, and then Renkl will look forward to their return. The cycle endures.

“If we sell our house, the next owner will tear it down, along with all its trees and all its flowers and all its berry-bearing vines and shrubs, and then where will the bluebirds go?”

Again, Renkl feels caught between difficult choices. The family home is too large for her and her husband now that they’re “empty-nesters,” alluding to Grief, Aging, and the Cyclical Wisdom of Nature as a theme. However, leaving would make the house vulnerable to change, threatening the memories that her family made there and the ecosystems that Renkl has allowed to flourish in her yard. The tension between pragmatism, praxis, and nostalgia means that Renkl faces a difficult decision, which lacks easy choices. This decision is an analogy for many of the choices facing humanity in the coming years.

“Suburbia isn’t paying attention. Homeowners are still in thrall to a status symbol invented by English nobility.”

The lawn, Renkl suggests, exemplifies how social conditioning can be harmful. The expectation in her community is that a lawn should be well-tended and maintained. Though a lawn may appear aesthetically tidy, it harms the environment. Renkl describes the social construction of landscaping to illustrate how people must relearn what it means to keep a healthy garden. Society has the wrong expectations, she suggests.

“As a writer, I err toward earnestness, but I’m at ease with this particular irony.”

Renkl takes photographs of the natural world, but not of herself. She recognizes the irony of this, as her writing is, in effect, a series of literary selfies in which she documents her daily life relative to the natural world. Renkl resolves this irony by imbuing her writing with purpose. Unlike seemingly narcissistic selfies, Renkl’s writing stems from selfless love of the natural world and an urge to share this passion with others. Renkl’s writing is political praxis rather than self-indulgence.

“Once it was safely out of our neighborhood, the cat would be following what amounts to a wildlife corridor through the heart of Nashville.”

Renkl sees the bobcat only once, but the creature illustrates how nature must adapt and learn to coexist alongside human development. A hidden network of trees and other elements in suburban Nashville creates a “wildlife corridor.” Forced from its natural home, the bobcat (like many other animals) has developed a way to cope with the encroachment of human development. These corridors represent the many hidden ways that life finds a way despite human destruction.

“A graveyard is hallowed ground, but holiness means little to children.”

The hallowed graveyard means nothing to children, as it means nothing to animals. This comparison between children and animals is revealing, hinting that humans aren’t as far removed from the natural world as they might believe. The reverence for graveyards is learned, like other, more destructive human behaviors, and can be unlearned. Renkl hints that adults may learn to love the natural world better by following the example of children, rather than demanding that children follow their example.

“I can’t change Americans’ love affair with poison, and I can’t solve the problems of climate change, but I can plant a garden.”

Renkl acknowledges the limitations of her ambitions. She plants a garden, enacting change on the individual level, yet modestly ignores larger issues. Her writing is, in itself, a political act, subtly hoping to shift social positions of the audience so that more people plant gardens as she has done. Renkl has planted her garden and, through her writing, hopes to plant the seed of inspiration in others so that they may plant gardens of their own.

“Time means something different to me now than it did when I was a girl sharing a bed with my baby sister in our room at the corner of the house.”

From the mature perspective of the final third of life, Renkl recognizes the malleability of time. Time seems much different now than when she was a child. While Renkl’s time may be dwindling, her writing lets her nostalgically examine her past and revisit her memories. Through her writing, she can alter her comprehension of time and consider the past more closely than she could dwell on the future in her younger years. This relationship with time is one way Renkl uses her work to effect change in her life.

“So why did the tree frogs prefer the poisoned yards of my neighbors to our natural yard? A yard that now boasted a nursery pond built especially for them?”

Renkl loves the natural world but is frustrated that her well-intentioned conservation efforts occasionally seem to falter. She laments the poison and pesticide her neighbors use, yet the frogs seem to prefer these dangerous gardens to the less manicured yard that Renkl has tried to design for their benefit. Rather than abandoning her efforts, however, Renkl uses these setbacks as a learning opportunity. She asks herself—and her audience—why the frogs prefer the poisoned yards and wonders how she can change her yard, rather than critique her neighbors and the frogs.

“You are turning its body into something beautiful: blood and feathers and hollow bones. Earthbound no longer, the dead are rising again in you, rising and rising, lifted on air.”

Renkl’s praise for the carrion-eating vultures is an attempt to see maligned creatures from a fresh perspective. Just as she hopes to change views about vultures or mosquitoes, she hopes that this alternative perspective might encourage an active interest in environmentalism, and that using her rhetoric to encourage a perspective change on one issue may open the door to changes on other issues.

“It never begins with a plan. I just start writing and trust the words to keep coming.”

Renkl talks about her writing process, which is similar to her approach to gardening. Rather than meticulously cultivating a traditional lawn, she allows nature to inspire and guide her. She observes the world around her to learn how to garden, just as she allows her observations to guide her writing. This organic approach to cultivation and writing illustrates the extent to which Renkl’s environmentalism affects all parts of her life.

“We have not yet learned how to cook for only two.”

In earlier life, Renkl learned to parent. She and Haywood learned to raise their children together, and their family grew up. Now, years later, she must learn to live differently. With her children gone, she must change once again. The meals she once cooked for an entire family are no longer suitable, and she feels as though she’s learning to cook all over again. This change to such a familiar and fundamental part of her life shows the extent to which the children leaving the home affects her life.

“The world is becoming dimmer to me whether I am aware of it or not.”

Renkl’s eyesight problems are emblematic of a broader social malaise. Her cataracts make the world grow gradually dimmer, so slowly that she may not even notice it. The natural world is disappearing similarly, sometimes so subtly that busy people aren’t even aware of how the world around them is dying. Thus, Renkl’s worsening eyesight is a metaphor for society’s blindness to climate change.

“Now I understand that every day I’m given is as real as life will ever get. Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days have always been running out.”

Renkl frequently turns pessimism into optimism. Though her book documents society’s destructive habits, she cherishes the perseverance and endurance of the natural world. Her remaining days aren’t a constraint, but an opportunity for affirmation. Nothing is ever guaranteed, she notes, and days are always running out, but this only adds impetus to her desire to bring about positive change in the world on whatever scale she can. Thus, she flips the concept of limitation, seeing it as an opportunity and a motivation.

“Believe me, I recognized the irony. There I was, driving through a climate-parched landscape with a full tank of gas, on a pilgrimage to do nothing more than watch a flower bloom.”

As a self-aware narrator, Renkl recognizes that she uses the same machinery that causes climate change, often for silly reasons. However, her acceptance of this irony is evidence of the broader problem: Individuals can’t affect or alter climate change. Rather, saving the world requires society-wide acceptance (of humans’ role in climate change) and society-wide action. By pointing out the irony of her own actions, Renkl shows how everyone must accept responsibility to bring about broad social change.

“Not knowing whether the snail was alive was just as likely to torment me at three in the morning as giving up on it without trying.”

Renkl can’t be sure whether her efforts to save the snail are effective. The only thing she knows is that the pain of doing nothing will always hurt more than not knowing whether she succeeded. This anecdote is one of Renkl’s many subtle attempts to convince others of the importance of action. Any action is important in the fight to save the environment, she implies; the only real pain stems from inaction.

“Planting a tree is a gesture of faith in the future.”

Renkl writes from the perspective of someone who is growing old. An important part of her maturing perspective is accepting that her environmental efforts aren’t for herself. Rather, she’s working to help future generations by planting the seed of inspiration as she’s planting a tree, hoping that the tree (and the impulse toward environmentalism) will flourish long after she’s gone and be cherished by her descendants. Her thoughts exemplify The Moral Urgency of Local Conservation as a theme.

“I am very close to the age Ruth was when she was my teacher.”

Throughout the book, Renkl notes how she has grown old. She now realizes that she’s approaching the age of her mentor, Ruth, at the point when Ruth had such an influence on her life. The implication is that Renkl is ready to take on the mantle of mentorship, hoping to inspire the next generation to action, just as Ruth inspired her. Renkl is ready to accept the responsibility that comes with advancing years.