The Parents and Grandparents

Quick Facts

• Role: Generational anchors whose remembered lives shape the book’s ethics of home, nature, and care
• First Appearance: Early recollections, recurring across essays such as “The Crow Family,” “Holiness,” “Who Will Mourn Them When They Are Gone?,” and “Of Berries and Death”
• Key Relationships: Their influence on Margaret’s gardening and moral imagination; their shaping of Haywood’s sense of family and loss

Who They Are

The Parents and Grandparents are remembered presences—steadfast, rooted, and practical—whose lives form the moral and emotional soil of the narrative. For Margaret Renkl, they are the human equivalent of deep-rooted trees: living repositories of habit and wisdom that steady her as she considers Aging, Family, and the Passage of Time. Renkl’s mother appears in gestures—transplanting a holly fern, planting monkey grass wherever she lands, bristling at a felled pine—while her great-grandmother, Mother Ollie, is remembered through the tactile holiness of a soft-edged Bible and a kept Sabbath. Even Haywood’s father, present by his absence, reenters the aisle of an ordinary grocery store when Renkl reaches for ice cream she no longer needs to buy.

Personality & Traits

Their defining qualities emerge through place, habit, and faith. The older generations live close to the land and closer still to one another, modeling a pragmatic tenderness that makes beauty out of scarcity and reverence out of routine.

• Connected to place: Alabama and coastal Georgia aren’t backdrops but bonds. Multigenerational homes and family graveyards embody durability over mobility; they lived—and remained—together, even in grief and after fire.
• Practical and resilient: A grandmother’s matter-of-fact warning to “Watch out for rattlesnakes” during blackberry picking shows intimate, unsentimental knowledge of wildness. Renkl’s mother plants exuberant beds even at temporary apartments—beauty as a portable practice.
• Family-oriented: Three generations share a small house because love and necessity align; no one can “imagine living apart.” This contrasts with modern shame around staying home, including Renkl’s own sons.
• Quietly faithful: Mother Ollie’s Sabbath is observed without fanfare: no “handwork,” no exceptions. Her well-worn Bible—its edges curved soft as a puppy—turns piety into touchable discipline.

Character Journey

These elders do not “develop” so much as Margaret’s understanding of them does. Childhood memories widen into an adult recognition of their quiet labor, their griefs, and the ethical shape of their days. Their stories become a lens for natural time: how growth, loss, and care echo in seasons and soil, the human rhythm that Renkl reads alongside the Cycles of Life, Death, and Renewal. The death of Haywood’s father marks the family’s hinge: Margaret and Haywood become the oldest generation. A pause in the ice cream aisle becomes a rite of passage—how love lingers as habit, and how habit, once emptied, measures what’s been taken and what remains.

Key Relationships

• Margaret Renkl: The elders are Margaret’s compass. Her mother’s aesthetic of abundance evolves into Margaret’s ecological gardening—beauty widened into stewardship. Her father’s quiet pride steadies her, and Mother Ollie’s Sabbath reframes rest as sacred constraint, not a luxury but a liturgy of limits.
• Haywood: His father’s death turns memory into mantle. Haywood and Margaret inherit “eldership” together; their shared grief consolidates a new role—keepers of stories, customs, and care. Haywood’s coastal roots, like Margaret’s Alabama memories, braid two landscapes into one family ethic.

Defining Moments

Their influence crystallizes in a handful of vivid scenes—ordinary acts that become moral touchstones.

• The Multigenerational Household (from “The Crow Family”): After a house fire, three generations live together and simply “never” move apart. Why it matters: It reframes dependency as devotion, challenging contemporary narratives that equate adulthood with dispersal.
• The Death of the Last Elder (from “Who Will Mourn Them When They Are Gone?”): “In the space of two weeks…all our parents gone.” Why it matters: The baton passes; grief becomes governance as Margaret and Haywood assume stewardship of family memory and ritual.
• The Sabbath (from “Holiness”): Mother Ollie declines to help with needlework on Sunday. Why it matters: Faith is embodied as boundary; rest becomes an ethical practice that seeds Margaret’s own reevaluation of work and holiness.
• Blackberry Picking (from “Of Berries and Death”): Children gather berries with a casual rattlesnake warning. Why it matters: It models coexistence with danger—knowledge instead of fear—and laments what’s lost as species decline and caution hardens into estrangement from the wild.

Symbolism

They function as roots: history made living, continuity made visible. Their gardens, farms, and long residencies mark a worldview in which the The Human-Nature Connection is not a project but a premise. Even their burials in country churchyards—teeming with life—quietly teach that death feeds the future. In this cosmology, family is a forest: older growth sheltering seedlings, fallen trunks nourishing what comes next.

Essential Quotes

Crow families always recall to me my grandparents, who lost their home to fire when their family was very young and had to move into my great-grandparents’ house just down the road. There must have been a time when my grandparents considered moving back out, but they never did... Maybe they just loved living together, all three generations in the same small house.

This reframes necessity as love. The image of crows—social, communal, fiercely bonded—maps directly onto a domestic ethic where proximity is not failure but flourishing. The ellipsis holds a lifetime of small choices that, together, become a value system.

On the first day of spring, I won’t think of flowers or greening leaves. I will think of something I have never actually seen: my grandmother as a young teacher... The sun is shining on my grandmother’s hair, browner than it ever was during the many years we lived together on the same Earth.

Memory here is imaginative fidelity: not falsehood, but a tender reconstruction that brings youth back into view. Spring’s renewal is recast as ancestral renewal—her grandmother’s unseen past greening the present.

“Watch out for rattlesnakes,” Mimi would say, with no more solemnity than if she were warning us to come home in time for supper. And that’s how I know that rattlesnakes were common in that time and in that place, though they are imperiled today... My grandmother would not have sent us into danger.

The tone—casual, confident—signals a culture of competence. It honors a lost equilibrium between humans and the more-than-human world, where caution coexisted with abundance and intimacy replaced alarm.

“Not today, honey,” she said. “The Lord tells us not to work on the Sabbath.” And handwork, by definition, is work.

A gentle refusal becomes a catechism of limits. In naming “handwork” as work, Mother Ollie dignifies rest as obedience and builds a family grammar in which holiness is practiced at the level of the hands.