These Little Sums

Margaret Renkl's The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year and Chris Arthur's What Is It Like to Be Alive? Fourteen Attempts at an Answer both came into being, in part, during our global pandemic and in the time surrounding COVID lockdowns, when everything stopped and we retreated to our homes and gardens. Renkl proceeds methodically with her project, mapping the book onto four seasons, beginning with winter (“The Season of Sleeping”) and ending with fall (“A Dark Season”). For his part, Arthur surveys what surrounds him, diving into memory, research, and imagination to create a wide-ranging assortment of thematically and philosophically linked texts. Both writers attend to the small and close-at-hand, describing tadpole ponds, local ancient sites, and childhood class photos. The books’ shared sense of quiet attention to living creatures, plants, family ties, and the passage of time stems from their pandemic-era geneses.Renkl's text reflects how, in those viral days, our daily plugging and unplugging seemed strangely to heighten the reality of the world nearest to us—often one of greenery and pets—rendering it all the more vivid and vibrant. Amid a viral outbreak, that “backyard” year brought birds, amphibians, insects, and wildflowers into focus. When a three-week bout of COVID renders Renkl “a hopeless, coughing, exhausted person” (Renkl 77), she returns to herself only once she remembers “how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless” (Renkl 79). “But there's another world that has always existed apart from and alongside civilization,” she writes. “While I was sick, it had changed, too, in the age-old turning of the earth” (Renkl 77). Spring springs, despite her feverish distraction.When my family and I moved from Columbia, Missouri, to Austin, Texas, at the height of the Omicron variant's 2021 spread, I kept myself healthy yet engaged by visiting the city's botanical gardens, walking its parks, and busying myself in learning about plants native to my new region. Like Renkl, I am an avid gardener, so I installed three large rain barrels around our modest house and had ecologically minded landscapers build two large rain gardens in our new front yard. As I filled my shelves with ever more books about gardens, my agave, yucca, Turk's cap, inland sea oats, mist flowers, and sages began to take root and fill out. Sometimes, as I weeded and watered the sprawling natives, I donned headphones and listened to the audio versions of the garden books lining my shelves (this is how I discovered that Renkl spoke with a Southern drawl). And as I filled and refilled my watering can from the rain barrels, I thought about the healing effects of gardens, while noting, if only to myself, that the fig, redbud, and buckeye trees I'd planted in my yard would one day be a gift to a future generation.Shortly after installing the gardens, I started to formulate a theory that such cultivated plots might function as sites of resistance, defiance, and creativity. The native landscape surrounding my new home was a labor of both body and intellect, so I wanted to believe that my sweat and dirty knees mattered: that working to provide food and shelter for insects was an ethical act. In both this respect and others, Renkl felt (and still feels) like a kindred spirit. Above all, I resisted the notion that my beloved garden might be a mere entertainment, or worse, a self-indulgence.But time passed, and as I planted, weeded, watered, and pruned my way through my own back- and front-yard year, the 2024 American election came and went like a gut punch. My reaction: to plant, water, and weed even harder. To prune with ever more intensity and vigor. I recall a common sentiment expressed by artistic and writerly friends in the first days after the vote: “I just need to hunker down, check out, and survive these next four years,” they wrote on social media. “I'm going to turn off the news and wait these four years out. Tell me when it's over,” they said over drinks.Eventually, I paused my frantic floriculture long enough to wonder if the habit was becoming an avoidance tactic. Gardens had seen me through the last crisis, yes. But was I now using them as a distraction from the next looming disaster? I wondered.Lockdown found the essayist Arthur (also a longtime kindred spirit) contemplating images—not in museums but in small-format reproductions in his kitchen: The page-a-day art calendar is a treasure trove of paintings and other artwork. It may not transform my kitchen into a gallery or museum, but it very definitely provides regular aesthetic enrichment. I feel better for seeing it. In these Covid days of gallery closure and individual seclusion, it's become a particularly welcome resource. It offers a sense of communion with other people's creativity, giving access to a wealth of striking work. . . . The great artworks illustrated in the calendar provide a pleasing counterweight to the often-grim news headlines. (Arthur 161)Each day, as he flips the page to reveal a new calendar image, Arthur performs “an exercise in mental arithmetic” (“little sums”), calculating the age of each work's creator at the time of its creation (Arthur 159). The computation unsettles him. “I've reached an age where, as a writer, it's very easy to harbor the worry that my best work is behind me,” he writes (Arthur 159). I, too, have counted how many books I've got left in me—to sobering results.One of several calendar-inspired essays in What Is It Like To Be Alive?, “A Lament for Tama,” imagines the life of the Japanese prostitute whose presence just beyond the frame is hinted at in Hiroshige's block print “Asakusa Ricefields.” The image depicts a white cat perched on a second-story windowsill surveying the view. Long ago, a poster of the scene had adorned Arthur's then girlfriend's flat, likely a print chosen out of a fondness for felines, and without an understanding that the tissues seen at the bottom right were for “mopping up bodily fluids after sex” (Arthur 8).Like Renkl, Arthur slows down, looks at what's within reach, and pays attention to the movements of the smallest living things that surround us. Some advancements are so tiny as to be imperceptible, as in Arthur's “Litmus Test”: Lichens are among the slowest-growing and longest-lived organisms on the planet. One specimen in Swedish Lapland is thought to be more than nine thousand years old. Their rate of growth is minutely incremental—in some species as little as 0.1 mm per year. Their growth can seem like something frozen; it would be easy to mistake them for natural markings that are no more alive than the rocks they decorate. (Arthur 198)Other changes happen quickly—too quickly. All around her, Renkl tells us, transformation is underway: Old houses are demolished, new ones pop up, neighbors move, grow ill, or die. “I feel the throb of time more acutely with every passing autumn,” she writes (Renkl 258). The land, too, is transfigured. Mourning the habitat loss she sees all around, Renkl resists through small gestures, like planting trees, letting leaves decompose in place, and erecting homes for frogs.When she and her husband toy with the idea of moving away from the noise and traffic that have encroached on their home over decades, the memories of raising her children there stop Renkl from leaving it. “I think too,” she writes, “of my wild neighbors. What would happen to the butterflies and the red wasps and the patient skink who suns herself on our stoop?” (Renkl 263). Hanging over this abundance of life is a shadow. Like Arthur, Renkl, too, counts down toward her death. But unlike Arthur, she seems unconcerned with literary productivity. The question that preoccupies her is not one of books or writing but one of living things that will perish without her protection.“I'm interested in how easy it is to look at things and not really see what's there,” writes Arthur (5). His is an essay—or indeed a book—then, about noticing what's been long overlooked. For her part, Renkl reminds us of Alice Walker's words: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it” (qtd. in Renkl 77). True, yes. Of course, Walker (and Renkl and Arthur) is right. And yet. And yet, I can't help but be struck by the contrast of the quiet, detailed observation that characterizes these two texts and the hugeness of the emergency roiling America.Each day brings news of ever more mass firings, deportations, disappearances, and threats to education at every level. And so, when the world (California, most recently) is literally on fire, I can't help but ask myself: Under such circumstances, what meaning should I find in books that detail the intricacies of a goldcrest's nest—“the gossamer of cobwebs, a network of binding filaments woven through the structure . . . the softness of the gathered moss is evident” (Arthur 172)? Or that narrate a bobcat's unexpected foray into a suburban backyard: “the woodpecker watched every measured step, swiveling on the stump when the cat took a hard right at the property line. She flew away only when the cat was parallel with the stump, hardly more than one bobcat-leap away” (Renkl 108)?I am a slow reader at the best of times. I always have been. This means that while I'd started these two books under one American administration, my reading took so long that by the time I'd worked my way through each of Arthur's essays and all four of Renkl's seasons, a new regime had taken hold and started down a breathtaking path of destruction. The essayist's first talent is to see things as they are. Her first duty is to tell the truth even about aspects of life that trouble us. “I'm not sure why,” writes Arthur, “but simply stating the facts of the matter clearly, facing up to our transience, looking at our situation without blinking, without reaching for some specious comfort is—for all its bleakness—strangely exhilarating” (Arthur 273–74). I will take Arthur up on his challenge and try to state my facts simply: This bookish journey back into the solitude and simultaneously yawning-yet-whooshing pandemic days has disoriented me. The inwardness of that experience has unsettled me all over again.It is undeniable that those COVID years were about solitude, about our most intimate ties and kinship, and about really seeing the details of our backyards. Each pandemic day seemed an eternity, but looking back now, those years somehow barely register. They all run together. Where did one start and the next begin? How long did it all last in the end? Does everyone struggle to count them as part of their past, as I do? If so, then what is the reason for our collective amnesia about that time?In 2020 and 2021, my gardens saved my sanity. Renkl's backyard birds gave her solace. Arthur's attention to flora afforded him the psychic space to dream and to write (“for planting read writing . . . for garden read book,” he translates Arthur 169). Still, I wonder: How do we backyard diggers and chroniclers, in the words of the German writer Elizabeth Langässer (1899–1950), guard against a “trifling with pretty little flowers at the dreadful . . . abyss of mass graves?” (qtd. in Klapper 59). In other words, how should we lovers of the natural world respond to the human and political catastrophe brewing outside our garden gates?Of what use are garden books in a time of great extinction? Or essays in an era of mass incarceration? What good can my tiny wild yard do as the crisis grows all around it? Renkl, in her great wisdom, has the beginnings of an answer to this question. She writes: To follow politics these days is to court bewilderment, denial, complete despair. Too often I feel I am living in a country I no longer recognize, a country determined to imperil every principle I hold dear and many of the people I love, too. Immersing myself in the natural world of my own backyard—or the nearby parks and greenways, or the woods surrounding our friends’ cabin on the Cumberland Plateau—is the way I cope with whatever I think I cannot bear. (Renkl 25)Take note of the shortness of your time on this earth and use it to make things (books, art, gardens, children) that will matter beyond your lifetime, says Arthur. And gather strength and wisdom from the natural world to do so, advises Renkl. Draw courage from the roots you've put down, say I. Find nerve in books that feed your soul. The next crisis is here. It calls us out from the backyard to battle.