Opening
Across these chapters, Margaret Renkl moves from intimate grief to attentive presence, tracing how endings open into beginnings. The pages braid private memory with backyard observation to illuminate the constant turn of Cycles of Life, Death, and Renewal, the reckoning of Aging, Family, and the Passage of Time, and the ethics at the heart of the Human-Nature Connection.
What Happens
Chapter 36: Praise Song for All the Beginnings
Renkl opens with a credo: for every ending, countless beginnings rise. After her mother’s death, she gathers her mother’s soft white hair from a brush and keeps it in an antique hair receiver that belonged to her grandmother, a ritual that lets her relive her mother’s scent whenever she opens the lid. When time finally erases the scent, she refuses to throw the hair away.
Instead, she drapes it over a holly branch in the yard. A chickadee swoops in and takes the hair to weave into its nest, turning what once anchored grief into a material for new life. The gesto binds her memory of her Parents and Grandparents to the living world’s work of renewal.
Chapter 37: The Grief of Lost Time
Called to Birmingham for the funeral of a childhood friend’s father, Renkl drives south from Nashville in spring, watching the season fast-forward as Tennessee’s fresh greens shift into Alabama’s “denser, deeper verdure.” The trip breaks her sticky-note vow to “Say no to everything,” and it coincides with her nephew’s high school graduation. The pairing—an old man’s funeral beside a young man’s milestone—becomes a vivid emblem of Aging, Family, and the Passage of Time, and she marvels that her nephew, one of The Sons she watched grow, now stands as a man.
Walking her old neighborhood, memory layers the present: the spot where her father waited for his own father; the bridge where her first boyfriend held her hand; the remodeled childhood house that feels strange—except for the silver maple sapling planted for her parents’ 25th anniversary, now towering over the roofline. At the funeral, a eulogy praising family togetherness “without being in a hurry” jolts her into questioning her frantic pace. The chapter closes with a holly fern her mother dug up just before she died. Never planted, it survives in a pot Renkl shuttles indoors and out each season, a small, sustaining ritual that carries memory forward and entwines Grief, Hope, and Environmental Change in daily care.
Chapter 38: Praise Song for the Baby Chickadees
Predators destroy the bluebird and cardinal nests, consuming eggs and nestlings. Against this harsh backdrop, a family of Carolina chickadees thrives in a nest box tucked beneath the eaves of Renkl’s house.
She listens as the nestlings’ voices shift day by day, their thin calls ripening into the parents’ brisk scolds. One morning, silence announces that the fledglings have flown. She misses their maiden flight and admits it breaks her heart “only a little,” accepting that life unfolds on its own schedule whether she witnesses it or not.
Chapter 39: The Season of Singing
Summer arrives as sound. From “sunup to sunup,” Renkl catalogs a chorus: bees buzzing, a chipmunk’s “chock chock chock,” the piercing cry of a red-tailed hawk, and the invisible music of songbirds. She imagines the undersong she can’t hear—like the movement of an earthworm—perceived by other creatures, widening the frame of the Human-Nature Connection to include what lies beyond human senses.
A thunderstorm turns listening into immersion. Sitting in the open doorway, she feels present as the thunder evokes her father, who loved storms. Wind sounds different through grass, a pine, a broken locust; later, twilight layers the undulating call of cicadas, the steadying katydids, the percussive scritch of crickets. Their ensemble seems to chant the season’s name: “Summer, summer, summer.”
Chapter 40: Praise Song for the Skink Who Has Gone to Ground
A YouTube video shows a man prying up a heavy rock to reveal a mother broadhead skink coiled around her eggs, motionless and resolute. The intended lesson triggers Renkl’s dread: when the rock goes back, does he crush what he wanted to show?
She longs for proof the skink is safe, but the only way to know would be to lift the stone again. The desire to observe becomes indistinguishable from the risk of harm. Her final wish—“more than I want to be assured that the skink is whole, her eggs unharmed, I want the man on YouTube to go away”—lands as an ethic of restraint.
Character Development
Renkl turns from passive mourning to active discernment—about time, attention, and the limits of looking. Memory grounds her, but presence guides her next steps.
- Reassesses her overfull life after the funeral’s praise for being together “without being in a hurry”
- Transforms grief into stewardship (the hair given to birds; the holly fern tended through seasons)
- Deepens her listening practice, finding connection through storms her father loved and the daily summer chorus
- Sharpens an ethic of nonintrusion, choosing the creature’s safety over her own certainty
Themes & Symbols
Life’s cycles thread every page: a mother’s hair becomes nest lining; a funeral stands beside a graduation; predators empty some nests while chickadees fledge. The book’s rhythm alternates quick “Praise Songs” with longer essays, mirroring quick eruptions of insight within the slow turn of seasons. Time’s speed feels bodily—spring accelerating into summer on a two-state drive—and yet time’s endurance towers too, like the silver maple outgrowing the house it once limned.
The human-nature bond expands from solace to ethics. Renkl listens herself into the world, but listening also teaches limits: to witness is not always to intervene; to care may require turning away. Symbols anchor these insights. The silver maple stands for endurance and family continuity; the potted holly fern makes memory a living practice sustained by care; the summer soundscape reveals a world richer than human hearing; the skink beneath the rock insists on the right to be unseen.
Key Quotes
“For every ending there are a thousand, a million beginnings.”
This credo frames the section’s arc, recasting loss as the seedbed of renewal. It prepares the reader to see grief objects—like hair or a fern—not as relics, but as materials for ongoing life.
The eulogy praises family togetherness “without being in a hurry.”
The phrase indicts Renkl’s harried routines and offers a gentler measure of a good life. Slowness becomes a moral practice, not a luxury.
Missing the fledglings’ first flight breaks her heart “only a little.”
The qualifier signals maturity in her watching. She accepts that nature’s value doesn’t depend on her presence, loosening the grip of possessive observation.
Evening voices chant the season’s name: “Summer, summer, summer.”
By giving the chorus language, Renkl turns sound into meaning. The refrain fuses perception and interpretation, making the listener part of the season’s proclamation.
“More than I want to be assured that the skink is whole, her eggs unharmed, I want the man on YouTube to go away.”
The line crystallizes an ethic: knowledge that requires disturbance may not be worth its cost. Care sometimes looks like leaving well enough alone.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This sequence marks a hinge between spring and summer and between remembrance and resolve. The Alabama trip catalyzes a reckoning with time, while the “Praise Songs” distill that reckoning into vivid emblems—the hair-turned-nest, the fledged chickadees, the hidden skink. Together, the essays and interludes show grief as motion rather than stasis: it becomes listening, tending, and choosing.
Structurally, the alternation of lyric and narrative mimics the natural cycles Renkl observes—brief bursts of song within longer spans of weather. Ethically, the section advances the book’s argument that the deepest connection to the living world may rest not in seeing everything, but in hearing enough to know when to stop looking.