The comfort of crows : a backyard year / Margaret Renkl ; art by Billy Renkl.

"A luminous book that traces the passing of seasons, personal and natural." --Jacket.

Wherever you are, stop what you're doing -- Winter. The season for sleeping -- Praise song for the coming budburst -- First bird -- How to catch a fox -- The bird feeder -- The winter garden -- Praise song for the praise song of a song sparrow in winter -- Hate to see that evening sun go down -- A seed in darkest winter -- Prise song for the dog's marvelous nose -- Done with waiting -- It's a mystery -- Praise song for mole hands in coyote scat -- The crow family -- The knothole -- Wild joy -- Ephemeral -- Praise song for a spring I was not alive to see -- Spring. The season of waking -- Who will mourn them when they are gone? -- Praise song for the maple tree's first green -- The names of flowers -- The beautiful world beside the broken one -- Wildflowers at my feet and songbirds in my trees -- Praise song for the killdeer on the school softball field -- Metamorphosis -- Praise song for the alien in the shade garden -- Hide and seek -- My life in mice -- Praise song for the redbird who has lost his crest and the skink who has lost his tail -- The bobcat next door -- And then there were none -- Dust to dust -- Praise song for Solomon's seal -- An acolyte of benign neglect -- Praise song for all the beginnings -- The grief of lost time -- Praise song for the baby chickadees -- Summer. The season of singing -- Praise song for the skink who has gone to ground -- Thirty-four is tadpoles -- Praise song for the red fox, screaming in the driveway -- Loving the unloved animals -- Pickers -- Of berries and death -- The teeming season -- Praise song for the carpenter bees eating our fence to ruin -- Kept safe in the womb of the world -- Reverse nesting -- The spider in my life -- Praise song for what hides in plain sight -- My life in rabbits -- Praise song for the first red leaf of the black gum tree -- Dislocation -- Praise song for the ragged season -- The world is a collage -- Praise song for the holes in pawpaw leaves -- Imagination -- Praise song for fingers that do not form a fist -- Fall. The season of making ready -- Praise song for a clothesline in drought -- Autumn light -- Flower of dreams -- Praise song for the back side of the sign -- The last hummingbird -- The butterfly cage -- Praise song for sleeping bees -- Holiness -- Praise song for forgetfulness -- Because I can't stop drinking in the light -- The Lazarus snail -- Praise song for a larger home -- How to rake leaves on a windy day -- The mast year -- An now the light is failing -- Praise song for dead leaves -- Ode to a dark season -- The thing with feathers.

"In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons -- from a crow spied on New Year's Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring -- what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer. Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author--and from us. For, as Renkl writes, 'radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.' With fifty-two original color artworks by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world." -- Publisher's description.