55 pages • 1 hour read
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of animal death.
Part 1: “Winter”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Season of Sleeping”
In an Introduction titled “Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing,” Renkl urges her audience to appreciate the natural world even as winter takes hold. Her suggestion is to “stop and look, but do not touch” (XV) the plants, seeds, and creatures. She describes the similarities between ducks and turtles, as well as between human teenagers and starlings. Renkl believes that humanity was not cast out of the Garden of Eden, but “merely turned from it” (XVI). To return, she says, people need only look at the natural world all around them.
When she was young, Renkl writes, she preferred the heat of the summer. Now that she’s older, age has given her an inner warmth, while “hubris has given us all a burning planet” (1). She still loves the changing of the seasons. The stillness of winter, she suggests, hints at a bountiful world that is “poised to unfurl” (2).
Renkl intersperses the narrative with “praise songs.” The first of these interludes is “Praise Song for the Coming Budburst,” which describes the brown bud that is dormant throughout winter. Though it may appear dead or buried, the bud “is waiting for its true self to unfold” (3).
