“Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss”
Author: Margaret Renkl
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Pages: 248
Price: $24.00 (Hardcover)
Southern Memoir Weaves Together Stories of Nature and Family
“Late Migrations” is a collection of 113 short pieces, little essays that run from a half page to 2 ½ pages, based on memories, observations, moments in Renkl’s life and the lives of her family. However, they are not casual anecdotes; each is a small, carved gem. Renkl is a Southern storyteller, but not of the slow, drawn out, oral tradition.
This book is purposely, I suppose, hard to categorize. It aims, successfully, to be a little “Walden,” a little “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” with nature observed closely and daily, over many seasons.
This close observation is done, mainly, with only one eye. Renkl had an untreated “lazy eye” as a child and sees poorly, but has learned to pay attention and sometimes uses a camera with a zoom lens to get a clearer picture.
Oddly enough, Alabama naturalist E. O. Wilson lost vision in one eye to a pinfish spine, and as an entomologist, using a magnifying glass holds his subjects, ants mainly, up close to his good eye to examine them in detail.
In both cases, attention is paid.
It is also a personal and family memoir, stretching from the earliest piece, dated 1931, to the newest, which come close to the present.
The essays, then, are arranged in two loosely alternating streams. The “memoir” stream begins in and around Lower Alabama, by which Renkl means Dothan. Her family had lived there for years; she spent her earliest days there, and then in Birmingham, and is now in Nashville.
From Lower Alabama we get stories told to Renkl by her grandmother. The first of these tells of the birth, at home, of Renkl’s mother. Her great-grandfather was a physician; all went well.
The second stream, the observation of nature, begins with an essay situated in Renkl’s back yard in Nashville. She is an avid birder, which can be very satisfying, but if one pays close, unsentimental attention, which she does, it can also be rather dismaying. Checking on a hatch of five bluebird eggs she finds one has a hole in it, perhaps pecked by a vicious, territorial little wren. Then all five go missing. A snake, probably, who swallowed them whole and slithered away.
The title, taken from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” is “Red in Tooth and Claw.”
The cycle of life, she says, might as well be called the cycle of death.
The next year she puts up a wren guard. Who knew devices had been designed to protect against wrens? But she loves wrens too. They have a lovely song, and life must kill and eat to live and reproduce.
Ah, nature.
Some of these pieces were published in the “New York Times,” where Renkl is a contributing opinion columnist, but she speaks very little of her educational background and writing life.
She graduated from Auburn and, later, with an MFA from the University of South Carolina. In between she takes time to tell us of her encounter with graduate studies in Philadelphia—at Penn, I presume. Of course, she was an avid reader and lover of literature but Latin and Old English were “more relevant to [her] notions of literature than anything [she] heard in the literary theory course. The aim of the course … was to liberate literature from both authorial intent and claim of independent meaning as achieved by close reading. ‘The text can’t mean anything independent of the reader,’ the professor, a luminary of the field announced. ‘Even the word mean doesn’t mean anything.’”
When Renkl insisted that there were inherent distinctions between works—using “King Lear” and “Jane Fonda’s Workout Book” as examples, the other students in the class laughed out loud at her naivete.
Thus did critical theorists take the joy out of reading and the study of literature.
They murdered while dissecting.
Renkl is very sensitive to the ways humans are destroying the natural world, through pesticides, global warming, hybrid farming.
Monarch butterflies numbered over a billion only twenty years ago. Today there are only 93 million, a loss of over 90%.
She plants milkweed and zinnias to attract monarchs and feed them. Some migrating monarchs stop in her garden to feast. She saves a few, not many, but she did Something.
In the family-centered essays, there are many happy occasions: births, marriages and holidays. Stories of older relatives are not tragic but they are inevitably terminal.
She grieves the loss of her elders, one by one, grandparents, parents, especially her mother, who returns to her in vivid dreams. She writes of the very real dislocation of empty nest syndrome as her four children grow up and move away.
Renkl, not really a hypochondriac, worries fiercely about possible breast cancer, certain at one point that she is dying—correct, since we are all dying—but as she concludes in that piece, “I wasn’t dying. Not yet.”
Because we humans are a part of the natural world, the two streams, stories of nature and family, are inevitably one.
Renkl tells of the day she has to have the talk, not the reproductive talk—the birds and the bees—but the mortality talk, with her three-year-old son.
There is a dead bird in the road.
He asks “All birds die?”
Yes.
“All squirrels die?”
Yes.
“All mommies die?”
Yes.
Finally, he asks the question we all ask:
“‘I will die?” he said, his voice quavering. ‘I will be dead?’”
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
