Opening
Autumn narrows to rain, wind, and failing light as a series of small encounters—one revived snail, a rake’s hush, a bare oak, a star-thick sky—redefine what hope looks like. Margaret Renkl grieves her emptying house and a changing planet, yet turns again and again to acts of care—saving, planting, raking, waiting—as she widens the meaning of home.
What Happens
Chapter 71: The Lazarus Snail
On a rainy weekend at a friend’s cabin on the Cumberland Plateau, Renkl and her husband, Haywood, sink into quiet. She reads Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, a memoir of companionship in convalescence, while their dog, Rascal, bats a small object she assumes is an acorn. It’s a dry snail shell—light as a bead, seemingly lifeless. Prompted by a Catholic-schooled conscience and an urgent need not to be the agent of harm, she tucks the shell into a watered succulent pot, expecting nothing.
An hour later, the snail extends, glossy and whole, and begins its slow descent down the pot. Panicked, she rushes it outside and shelters it under a laurel; when she returns to take a photo, it has vanished into the wet woods. The scramble ignites an old fear: the time she knocked a house wren’s nest loose and frantically shoved it back, afraid she’d doomed the nestlings. The throughline is sharper than guilt—an anxious, protective empathy that moves her to intervene, then step away.
Chapter 72: Praise Song for a Larger Home
After her youngest leaves for college, Renkl faces a house echoing with absence. When her Sons return, she feels like a “girl spurned but loving still,” tender and displaced at once. To ease this ache, she decides to “enlarge the definition of home”—to claim the woods and their vivid ordinary as kin, a cure that binds Aging, Family, and the Passage of Time to the Human-Nature Connection.
The more she attends to the wild edges, the less estranged she feels. Grief doesn’t vanish; it dilates. As the family center thins, the home perimeter grows, letting in chickadees, creeklight, moss, and wind.
Chapter 73: How to Rake Leaves on a Windy Day
Renkl offers an instruction manual for tenderness disguised as yard work. She rejects the leaf blower’s racket and fumes, choosing a rake: quiet, precise, communal. The rake’s rhythm becomes a sensory prayer that recalls her mother combing her hair—gentle, patient, caring. She urges leaving leaves to shelter insects and feed the soil, treating the yard as an “urban forest” to be tended rather than controlled, a living system nested within the Cycles of Life, Death, and Renewal.
Wind doesn’t foil the work; it sets the tempo. She pauses often—breathing petrichor, listening to scolding squirrels—until the day’s troubles fade with the traffic noise. Raking becomes resistance to speed and noise culture, a practice of presence. Before winter, she pockets one leaf to carry through the cold as proof that nothing ends cleanly; life keeps circling.
Chapter 74: The Mast Year
Across the neighborhood, trees pour seed—oak, hickory, tulip-poplar—yet her great white oak is stingy with acorns. The mismatch prompts a primer on mast years and their ripple effects: fewer acorns mean fewer squirrels and blue jays, reverberations you can hear in a quieter yard. She traces the lineage of her trees to a post–World War II neighbor who planted to hold the hill in place, a care-taking ethic at odds with today’s developers, whose bulldozers shear roots and bury trees alive, an ache that runs through Grief, Hope, and Environmental Change.
Maybe the oak’s poor crop reflects a lost mate, she thinks, as nearby canopy vanishes. She and Haywood counter with saplings—natives tucked into every open patch—each planting a gesture aimed forward. She remembers her mother (honored in The Parents and Grandparents) persuading the power company to paint an ugly pole green, then hiding it behind dogwoods. The season ends with a human mast year: Thanksgiving, when all her sons gather for the demanded feast, abundance chosen and shared.
Chapter 75: And Now the Light Is Failing
November thins the light and drags the heart. Renkl recalls her college mentor Ruth’s counsel for insomnia: accept wakefulness; let rest, if not sleep, restore you. She experiments with a similar truce for her eco-despair—a “temporary ceasefire” with anxiety modeled on the WWI Christmas armistice. She cannot stop hollies from blooming in November, cannot reverse the warming signs, and “fretting ensures the survival of not one baby bird.”
What she can do is breathe, watch, wait. She reframes sleeplessness as a vigil, active and receptive at once. In the dark’s depth, stars sharpen—beauty that requires darkness to be seen—offering a fragile, sufficient hope.
Character Development
Renkl moves through fear, grief, and wonder toward practiced resilience. Small acts—saving a snail, raking slowly, planting trees, choosing to wait—compose a moral stance.
- Her empathy sharpens into action: she intervenes to help and then learns to step back.
- The empty nest pushes her to widen home beyond walls, binding family love to landscape care.
- Mindful labor (raking, planting) becomes her antidote to helplessness, trading noise and control for attention and reciprocity.
- She adopts a psychological tool—a ceasefire with despair—to keep working and loving in a damaged world.
- Her mother’s example of everyday beautification and insistence on care becomes a template for her own stewardship.
Themes & Symbols
A “Lazarus” snail embodies return: what looks dead may only be waiting for water. That quick resurrection threads through the section: a single leaf kept for winter, a mast year’s feast after scarcity, stars that need night to burn bright. Abundance and deprivation alternate, and Renkl learns to meet both with care.
The tools matter. A rake represents partnership with the yard’s hidden life; a leaf blower embodies dominance and erasure. Likewise, planting is a future-facing vote, a counterweight to loss. As daylight wanes, despair rises—but the practice of enlarging home, tending soil, and pausing to look up converts fear into steadier forms of hope.
Key Quotes
“A girl spurned but loving still.”
This phrase captures the ache of the empty nest: love unchanged even as its object moves away. It frames her later move to expand home as a way to stay loving without clinging.
“Enlarge the definition of home.”
The line is a thesis for these chapters. By claiming woods and wind as kin, she replaces scarcity with belonging, turning private grief into relational abundance.
“Nothing is truly over.”
Her winter leaf becomes a pocket talisman. The claim resists tidy endings and affirms ecological continuity—decomposition, dormancy, return.
“A gesture of faith in the future.”
Planting native trees becomes more than landscaping; it’s a moral wager that tomorrow exists and deserves shade. The phrase reframes stewardship as hope in action.
“A temporary ceasefire.”
Borrowed from wartime, the metaphor dignifies rest as strategic, not weak. She chooses to pause despair so she can keep doing the work that matters.
“Fretting ensures the survival of not one baby bird.”
This blunt line separates feeling from efficacy. Anxiety without action saves nothing; attention and care might.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
As autumn darkens, Renkl pivots from noticing to choosing. These chapters gather a toolkit for living faithfully in a frayed season: rescue what you can, tend what you have, plant for who comes next, and make room for rest and night. The revived snail anchors her trust in renewal; the rake, the saplings, and the ceasefire translate that trust into daily practice. The section links private thresholds—children leaving, light failing—to planetary thresholds, and shows how small, sustaining acts create a larger home capable of holding both grief and hope.