SHE HAS HAD various job titles in her career, but writer Margaret Renkl says one consistent role in her life for decades has been that of “a window-gazer,” someone who watches what’s going on out there. Even better, she gets outdoors and really looks around, calling into play what she says are the greatest tools of a naturalist: silence and stillness.
“Sit quietly and let the world come to you,” Renkl writes. Now she has a new book out to help us cultivate our attention of the natural world, and she’s here to talk about some of her tactics for doing just that.
Like many readers, I got to know Margaret Renkl in 2019 upon the publication of her must-read book “Late Migrations.” Since 2017, she’s been contributing a popular weekly opinion column to “The New York Times,” and somehow in between writing all those newspaper columns, she’s also published several books, including “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year” in 2023, and now a companion journal to it called “Leaf, Cloud Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal” to help us slow down and really take in the natural world’s happenings all year long.
Margaret Renkl, whom I affectionately call Margaret R. of the South, is based in Nashville, and I’m glad she made the time to join me from there.
Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of her latest book, “Leaf, Cloud Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal.”
Read along as you listen to the Dec. 2, 2024 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
slowing down with margaret renkl
Margaret Renkl: I’m always thrilled to talk with you, Margaret R of the North. [Laughter.]
Margaret Roach: Yes, we have the country covered, at least the Eastern half of it. Right?
Margaret Renkl: The Rocky Mountains are really hard to get over.
Margaret Roach: Yeah, I know. It’s a big climb. So yes. I should say before we get started that we’ll have a book giveaway of the new book, which is illustrated with your other work by your brother, Billy. And the illustrations are just reason enough—and the writing and the illustrations together, oh my goodness. Beautiful. It’s just beautiful.
Margaret Renkl: Thank you. I’ll let him know that you said that.
Margaret Roach: Yeah. And I’m a professional window-gazer too, by the way, and I loved seeing that you said that about yourself. And do you have binoculars by your desk like I do [laughter]?
Margaret Renkl: I do have binoculars. They are of limited use. There’s only a very certain kind of range where they work for me, because I’m legally blind in one eye. So I don’t really have binocular vision. But I recently found some binoculars that work with my glasses, so that helps a lot. But I don’t have them at my desk. I have them, right now, on the dresser next to our bedroom window, because I’m spying on the squirrels that have taken over my screech-owl nest box.
Margaret Roach: Oh boy. Oh boy. And so whether you’re inside looking out or outside in nature, you’re not just looking for the big, obvious moments. The one you just described, I would think of as more of an obvious moment, like the squirrels taking over the owl box, or if some flashy bird or unusual animal stops by. But a lot of the time it’s really the subtleties that you’re taking in. And I was just curious about this transitional season, fall into almost winter, what are some of the subtle things that you are sort of looking at, marveling at? I mean, I could look at the leaves all the time in all their stages of decomposition and everything, the textures and the colors and anyway, and the sound of the leaves.
Margaret Renkl: Those leaves. And we have a very tree-dense lot. It used to be a tree-dense neighborhood. This neighborhood is built in a spot that used to be a nursery, outside of town. It’s not outside of town anymore, but our trees are still large and full of leaves. And so many of my neighbor’s homes have been torn down and replaced by much larger homes, and the trees were lost in that process. So I do spend a lot of times looking at trees and leaves.
This morning, the squirrels in my owl box were importing leaves, so they needed a little… Evidently we’re going to have a cold night tonight, because they were definitely bringing in blankets.
Margaret Roach: Oh!
Margaret Renkl: But I’m looking for stuff like that. I’m looking for what’s happening that’s unexpected. Right now my blanket flowers and my black-eyed Susans are blooming for a second time, and that shouldn’t be happening in November. The neighbors who have azaleas, even one neighbor has a dogwood that’s blooming—no leaves, but just the blooms as though it were late March. So the world is all mixed up right now, and that’s one of the things I’m looking for is what’s changing, what’s different, because it’s supposed to be different as the year progresses, and what’s different because it shouldn’t be different because our climate is changing.
Margaret Roach: And so there is that sadness in what you write about, but there’s also a lot of celebration and wonder and so forth. So it’s poignant; I mean, I think a lot of the observations are poignant. They’re filled with: Oh my goodness, this is different, and it’s not all safe and cozy and just plain beautiful. It’s also a little scary sometimes.
Margaret Renkl: Well, it truly is. It can be quite terrifying, in fact. But it’s also inevitably surprising. I think it would be a terrible mistake to think that because I have neighbors with azaleas in bloom at the very end of November, that doesn’t mean that all is lost. Because I also have this year, in late November, the largest flock of cedar waxwings I’ve seen in years and years. So the cedar waxwings come to my yard every year to eat the berries off the American hollies. And the flock had seemed for years to be dwindling, almost to nothing. And this year it’s incredible. It’s incredible. And I don’t know why. And I would love to know, and that’s one of the things I’m looking for.
Margaret Roach: So this new book is a journal, and each chapter gives us a kind of a quote from “The Comfort of Crows,” like a citation from “The Comfort of Crows,” the previous book, and then gives us kind of a prompt, something to think about, and gives us a space to write down our thoughts. It’s a journal, as the title says. So I want to go through some of those prompts in a moment, some of those chapter openers, so to speak, in a moment. But have you had a journaling practice at times in your life? Do you record your nature observations in some orderly fashion? I mean, for me, I used to write them in notebooks, and then the iPhone era came and I started snapping pictures. And of course they’re chronologically filed automatically, so I sort of got lazy. And I don’t have a journal in words anymore. It’s more photographic. But what about you, your journaling practice, so to speak?
Margaret Renkl: Well, I don’t have a journaling practice, to be completely honest. The hardest thing for me as a writer is the blank page. I think that’s true for a lot of writers. And so I’ve not ever been really good at just taking the blank notebook, making a header and starting to write. I do rely on the photo app on my iPhone for dates, and I did at one time keep a yearly blog; on Sunday I wrote a piece, something I had seen, and that was kind of the closest thing to a journal I ever had was that blog. My brother now will say this, he not only keeps my brother Billy Wrinkle, the artist who did the artwork for both “The Comfort of Crows” and “Leaf, Cloud, Crow” and also “Late Migrations,” the book you mentioned earlier.
He keeps an actual written journal; he has since we were in high school. He also has an incredible garden journal. I wish you could see it, Margaret. It’s just stunning. It’s made from…he actually cut the pages that he decided the size he wanted and had the book made as a blank journal. And it is words and it’s dates and temperatures, and it is also paintings and collages. It’s amazing.
But with “Leaf, Cloud, Crow,” I was thinking more of the journaler who’s like me, who looks at that blank page and thinks, “I don’t have it, I can’t do it.” But the writing prompt maybe gives you a place to start, is what my hope is: that some of the writing prompts have to do with observations, things you might expect to find at a certain time of year. Some of the prompts have to do with memories. Most children are much more tapped into the natural world than adults are. And I was hoping that thinking back to those memories would help that feeling of connection come back. And then there are some that are just about…just meditations. There’s a lot of help getting started in this journal than in a typical blank-page journal.
Margaret Roach: Right. And so we should say that the book doesn’t start with New Year’s Day or New Year’s week. It starts in December.
Margaret Renkl: It starts on the first day of the winter solstice for this year. And for most years it’s December 21st.
Margaret Roach: And then it ends with the middle week of December, so to speak, the one just before that, December 13th to 20th. And so it kind of begins and ends with in December, which it’s interesting.
Margaret Renkl: That was because it tracks with “The Comfort of Crows.”
Margaret Roach: Exactly.
Margaret Renkl: Yeah. One of our real hopes—by our, I mean my editor, whose idea this whole thing was—one of the things that she and I, Joey McGarvey and I, both hope is that it’s a beautiful physical object, this little journal. And by the end of the year, if you’re following along with the prompts, you should really have your own version of “The Comfort of Crows in your nearby.
Margaret Roach: Right. And this really, again, it’s like a citation, a quote from the other book and then a prompt. And so for instance, for the first week, December 21st to 27th, that the book opens with, you say, the quote is that, “Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are reckless metaphor makers anyway. And only a fool could fail to find the lesson here.”
And then the prompt is you ask us to use this space that you provided, the blank page that you provided. You say, “Observe the behavior of something in the natural world: dead leaves carried on the wind, perhaps, or clouds moving across the sky, or a wild creature living nearby.”
Is there a metaphor in what you’re observing for something you’re pondering in your own life? So you help us to get started with conquering that blank page, yes? [Laughter.]
Margaret Renkl: Well, that’s the hope. And I do think that we are, as a species, intensely seeing connections between things. I think that’s part of being a social species. We want to know how we are like something else, how we are like our neighbors. You would maybe be hard pressed to notice this about us during an election year, but we as a species tend to seek common ground. And what I would love for “Leaf, Cloud, Crow” to do is to help us find that common ground with the wild world, too.
Margaret Roach: Speaking of, we were talking earlier of being people who look out the window, window observers, and I think it’s in one of the winter weeks in January, you say a quote from the book. “It’s a good time to stay indoors and to participate in the natural world by observing it through a window.” And you advise us to kind of watch an animal through the window that doesn’t know we’re there, and how does its behavior change depending on what else happens—if another animal comes up or whatever.
And so I thought that was interesting because when I’m watching from inside as opposed to outside where I may startle an animal and it may disappear, there’s that chance to watch for a longer time, and watch it as it goes about its business, and as you say, has these interactions and so forth. Have you seen anybody lately besides those wacky squirrels who have taken over the owl box? [Laughter.]
Margaret Renkl: I was astonished on Sunday morning, standing at my front window being very still, because I was hoping to see the bluebirds emerge from the nest box. They nest in the nest box in the summer and spring. But they roost in the nest box in the cold weather, and they’ve started sleeping in there at night.
And I love to watch them come out like clowns from a clown car. There’s so many of them in there huddling together, keeping warm. And instead what I saw was a little winter wren in the leaf litter under the bushes in front of the window. And they’re secretive little birds. And I’ve only ever seen one once before. But I know there was one here last year because I heard it, or I should say the Cornell Lab of Ornithology heard it through the Merlin app, which is a wonderful, wonderful tool for people.
And I mentioned one of the things that “Leaf, Cloud, Crow” offers is a set of resources for basically getting started with IDs. And the Merlin app is just, it’s free and it will, I know you’ve written about this in the Times yourself, but it is a wonderful way to find out who’s in your yard that you can’t see. But I knew there was a winter wren last year, and this year I saw it, and it’s just such a delightful surprise. Of course, the second it realized I was there, it scooted away. But most of the time, certain times of day, especially with the slant of light, they can’t see what’s inside and I can see what’s outside and I see a lot.
Margaret Roach: Yeah, I think that a quality that we probably both share as watchers is that we like to see what the animal, or in my case and your case as well, I think the plant is doing—what’s it all about and what are its interactions. Not just check it off a list, not just say, “I saw that, I saw that, I saw that” like it’s a competition or something, and we’re just adding up gold stars or something like that, keeping a life list. Yeah, I like to get to know them. And the kind of observation you were just making about…I love the clown car idea. That’s a real privilege to get to see that group coming in and out of their roosting place in winter. That’s great, the bluebirds.
Margaret Renkl: It’s one of the definite advantages of, I think it must be aging, but I am reaching the age where I want to eat supper at 5 o’clock and I want to go to bed when it gets dark. So I’m up earlier. Other times of my life, I was not necessarily up early enough to see the clown car.
Margaret Roach: You just said something about aging, and in the book, in the new book, I think you talk about how when you see a particular plant or animal—you see a frog or you see a bluebird or whatever—it’s not just that individual that it’s conjuring for you. It also stimulates memory, yes?
Margaret Renkl: Yes. I think what I was talking about earlier, we at least in my generation and in my children’s generation, at least for my children, where they wanted to play was outdoors. Where I wanted to play was outdoors. I was not a dollhouse kind of child. And so I remember one of the first words I ever said was blue jay, according to my parents. So there are family stories, there are people now gone, that these creatures bring back to me. And I think for anybody who had a childhood outdoors, they will feel the same way if they’re starting to systematically try to observe what’s going on around them.
Margaret Roach: Right. When you just spoke about that, what it reminded me of is something else. I believe you wrote about it in “The Comfort of Crows,” and I think it’s here again in “Leaf, Cloud, Crow,” about marking the new year, like the first bird you see: this ritual of the first bird you see. Can you tell us about that?
Margaret Renkl: It’s really a game that just sort of gets passed down, I think among people who love birds. It’s just a little fun legend that the first bird you see on New Year’s Day is going to be kind of your theme bird for the year. It’s going to set the tone for the year. And so you see which bird you have, and you look up the characteristics, and you see whether those characteristics have anything to teach you. So the blue jay is brash and bold and intelligent and bright, and you think, O.K., this is going to be the year I am brave, or something like that. Whatever works for you.
Margaret Roach: Well, and speaks up: the blue jay definitely has something to say almost all the time. Yes. Yesterday I was outside doing some chores, and it was cold. It wasn’t nice; it’s feeling a little wintry now, finally, here. But in the distance in the woods, there was a whole group of turkeys somewhere. I couldn’t see them, but that gobbling, that hysterical gobbling where they just all… And I just burst out laughing. I can’t, whenever I hear that a group of them doing that, I just can’t stop laughing. It is the funniest sound. Do you know what I mean?
Margaret Renkl: [Laughter.] I do. I do. And I don’t think they know what’s happening this week of Thanksgiving, but I can imagine it’s easy to imagine what they might be saying about that.
Margaret Roach: True. It even makes it more funny. And the Carolina wren, you have Carolina wrens, yes? Sometimes we do. Yeah. That’s a cheeky little bird, right? How many preposterous places at your house has it decided to make a nest in, for instance?
Margaret Renkl: Well, right now it is roosting in the nest. It built, not this summer, but last summer in my clothes pin bag, I just decided once the baby birds left the nest, Carolina wrens, I don’t think typically reuse a nest, but it was a late clutch of baby wrens. And so I left the leaves in there.
They make the most gorgeous nests. Carolina wrens love to embellish their nests with skeletonized leaves, the leaves where only the veins are left. And it’s just like a trademark of Carolina wrens, they build their nest and then they embellish it with this beautiful lacey leaf. And so I just left it, and they roosted in there all winter long last year. And in fact, if I was outside near the clothesline too near sunset, they would fuss at me. They were like, “You’re keeping me from bed. Go away. I need to get in without you watching me.” [Laughter.] And so I just left them. I guess I’ll just have to buy all new clothespins, because they’re back to roosting in it again.
Margaret Roach: Oh, they’re, they’re very funny, very funny birds.
Margaret Renkl: I love those little birds.
Margaret Roach: Yeah, I didn’t used to have them in the winter here. They’ve moved, their range has extended further north and now I have them year round in the last I don’t know how many years. But yeah, so it’s fun to be with them.
When we were talking about this earlier today, and also when we had last year done a webinar together to celebrate the publication of “The Comfort of Crows,” we kind of talked about how the garden or nature isn’t all just the escape and beauty that it felt like decades ago when I began being more engaged with it. It brings us face-to-face with the chaos of the changing climate and its impact on our beloved species and their decline and so forth.
And so I think it was in “The Comfort of Crows,” and again, you acknowledge it again in the journal now, you say in your writing, “I’m not trying to hide from the truth, but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful.”
And so I guess I just wanted to talk a little bit about that aspect, because I think that definitely comes through in all the prompts, or many of them at least. And in all your writing, really, as I said earlier, it’s kind of poignant.
Margaret Renkl: It is for me; I think it is for anybody who’s paying attention, a lot of people aren’t paying attention. But I do think that it’s important for us to luxuriate in the beauty every chance we have and not just worry and fret about the peril that our beloved creatures and plants face. It’s a hard balance to find, but I think that it’s the only way we’re going to make it through. We have to remind ourselves with as much joy and beauty as we can find that this is a world worth fighting for.
Margaret Roach: And as you point out in a number of places in “The Comfort of Crows” and again in “Leaf, Cloud, Crow,” the new book, every little bit that we can plant and every little way that we can care for nature differently, more gently and more consciously, can make a difference. No matter how small, it can make a difference. So you encourage us.
Margaret Renkl: It not just makes a difference. I mean it makes a difference if you buy things in packaging that isn’t plastic; we just don’t see that difference; we don’t feel it viscerally. But when you plant a native plant, or leave the leaves, you see more fireflies next year than you saw this year because you left the leaves for the larvae to overwinter. And if you plant a native plant, you see butterflies. It’s visible and it’s immediate. And that’s very comforting.
Margaret Roach: Yes, and spurs us onward. So Margaret R of the South, I’m always glad to talk to you, and congratulations on the latest book. I don’t know how you do it.
Margaret Renkl: Thank you so much, Margaret. It’s always just a wonderful delight to talk with you.
(All illustrations from Margaret Renkl’s “Leaf, Cloud, Crow” are by Billy Renkl.)
enter to win a copy of ‘leaf, cloud, crow’
I’LL BUY A COPY of “Leaf, Cloud Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal” by Margaret Renkl, for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:
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prefer the podcast version of the show?
MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Dec. 2, 2024 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
