55 pages • 1 hour read
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide features depictions of animal death.
Part 2: “Spring”
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary: “The Season of Waking”
Spring returns, but Renkl notes that winter hasn’t entirely left. Ice lingers, threatening many of the green leaves that have started emerging. Nevertheless, she feels “once more among the living” (65).
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary: “Who Will Mourn Them When They Are Gone?”
Renkl thinks about the eastern hardwood forests of America, which are “now all but entirely gone” (67). European diseases and destructive human behavior have wiped out many of the oldest forests in the US. With them, many of the local animal populations that evolved to live in such forests are now dwindling. Renkl worries about selling her family home, since “the next owner will [likely] tear it down” (68) to build a new house, just as the old forests were removed. She thinks about elderly relatives who have passed away, reminding her of her own mortality. The world has changed, she knows, but it’s still beautiful. This is the tragedy of people like her, she suggests: The “beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world” (70).
In “Praise Song for the Maple Tree’s First Green,” Renkl thinks about the poetry of Robert Frost. His lines, though beautiful, seemed strange to a young girl from Alabama, but as she grew up, she learned that “nothing gold can stay” (71), as Frost suggested.
