The Sons

Quick Facts

• Role: The three adult children of author Margaret Renkl and her husband, Haywood; a quiet but constant emotional throughline in the book
• First appearance: Early pandemic-era essays when two younger sons return home, setting off Renkl’s “reverse nesting”
• Key relationships: Their mother (primary lens), their father (steady partner in transition), and one another (a tight sibling unit)
• Function in the narrative: Catalysts for reflections on Aging, Family, and the Passage of Time and the “empty nest,” mirroring the book’s nature cycles

Who They Are

The Sons are less onstage characters than a presence felt through motion, memory, and the ache of departure. Renkl rarely describes them physically; instead, they appear through actions, tossed-off remarks, and the spaces they leave behind. That restraint makes them feel universal—any reader’s grown children poised between home and away—so that their leave-taking resonates as both a family milestone and a natural event. Their arc refracts the book’s central insight: the human household participates in the same cycles Renkl watches in her yard.

Personality & Traits

Renkl sketches the brothers with swift, revealing strokes that show restlessness, affection, and ordinary humor. Their personalities emerge in how they move through the house—opening the fridge, helping with a project, planning an exit—and in how they close ranks around one another. The portrait is loving and unsentimental: young men impatient to launch, yet still tethered by habit and care.

• Independent: The two younger sons, home due to the pandemic, immediately start hunting for their own apartment—clear evidence of adult autonomy reasserting itself.
• Close-knit: They plan to live together and prioritise staying near their older brother, signaling a sibling bond that steadies the family even as the household shifts.
• Relatable and wry: From “Is there anything…that’s already cooked?” to the fridge-door stare, their banter captures ordinary, funny exasperations of post-college life.
• Contemporary pressures: Their awkwardness about living with parents reflects modern expectations of independence, a low-key shame that accelerates their launch.
• Helpful and collaborative: In “Thirty-Four Is Tadpoles,” the youngest son spends a day helping Renkl set up a stock-tank pond—practical care that doubles as a soft farewell.
• Present-in-absence: The lack of physical description and the emphasis on rooms, scuffs, and charts make their identities felt most sharply in what they leave behind.

Character Journey

The brothers’ journey runs from “return” to “release.” Forced back home by a global crisis, they chafe against the regression to childhood bedrooms and the limbo of delayed adulthood. As “reverse nesting” gives way to action, they find an apartment, coordinate a move, and—almost at once—convert the family house from bustling to hollow. Renkl follows in their wake, narrating the quiet after-sound of a family’s busiest years: dents painted over, growth marks preserved, doorways suddenly still. Later reunions—holiday surges of bodies and noise—confirm that the launch is real but not ruinous. The sons complete a developmental arc toward independence, and Renkl begins a parallel arc toward witnessing: learning how to love grown children by letting them go.

Key Relationships

• With Margaret Renkl: The mother–sons relationship is the book’s primary conduit of feeling. Renkl’s tenderness toward them heightens the sting of their departure, which she renders in domestic images (empty rooms, painted-over scuffs) and startled grief. Through them she contemplates what it means to mother adults: to accept change without mistaking it for loss, even when it feels like loss.
• With Haywood: As co-parent, Haywood helps the sons scout housing and shares the silence of the emptied home. His presence models steady accompaniment—supporting their independence without clutching—and provides Renkl a partner in the ritual of packing, leaving, and remembering.
• With one another: The brothers’ decision to live together and remain close to the eldest suggests a family culture of loyalty that survives the logistical break of moving out. Their solidarity reassures the parents: departure isn’t dispersal but a reconfigured closeness.

Defining Moments

The brothers’ story is told in snapshots that braid domestic detail with seasonal change. Each moment deepens the theme of leaving as a natural ripening rather than a catastrophe.

• “Done with Waiting” (Chapter 2): The younger sons’ pandemic return stalls their momentum—and their patience. Renkl’s confession that she wants “nothing to change” and “everything to change” crystallizes a tension at the heart of parenting grown children: the wish to freeze time and to free it.
• “Reverse Nesting” (Chapter 11): The move-out arrives all at once, transforming the house into an archive of scuffs, charts, and constellations on a child’s ceiling. By walking the rooms, Renkl turns ordinary maintenance into a liturgy of remembrance, locating grief inside the housekeeping of goodbye.
• “The Mast Year” (Chapter 15): Anticipating Thanksgiving, Renkl frames the sons’ homecoming as a “mast year”—a season of abundance that can’t be commanded, only received. The metaphor insists that absence and fullness are both cyclical; the feast validates the separation that makes reunion sweet.

Symbolism & Motifs

The sons function as emblems of the yard’s own dramas: fledglings testing wings, fox kits slipping from the den, sap rising and ebbing. Their launch echoes the book’s meditation on Cycles of Life, Death, and Renewal. Domestic objects—growth marks on a doorframe, stars on a bedroom ceiling, the well-stocked fridge—become reliquaries of a life stage that has ended but not disappeared. In the dedication, Renkl names them her “faith in the future,” casting them as the next ring of growth in the family tree: proof that what departs also continues.

Essential Quotes

“How is it possible that we’re living in our childhood bedrooms?” they would say as the pandemic dragged on.
This line captures the sons’ dissonance: adults inhabiting rooms designed for earlier versions of themselves. It underlines a central theme of the book—how spaces remember us—and explains the urgency behind their move to reclaim adult identities.

Burglars broke in, tore everything apart, and took all our valuables with them. Burglars broke into my house and stole my babies.
Renkl’s metaphor reframes an ordinary life transition as a sudden violation, revealing the shock of quiet that follows their departure. Calling the sons “valuables” cuts through cultural scripts about independence to name the true loss: not dependency, but daily nearness.

“Is there anything in this house to eat?” my sons would ask, standing in front of a well-stocked refrigerator. If I pointed out all the options, they would clarify: “Is there anything in this house to eat that’s already cooked?”
Humor here softens the tension of crowded cohabitation. The joke also exposes a tender habit loop—children asking, mother providing—that cannot fully survive their adulthood, making the eventual silence of the kitchen more poignant.

When the painters arrive to remove the dents and scratches and scuff marks of the growing-up years, I ask them to be careful not to paint over the growth chart marked on the kitchen doorframe. “And please don’t take down the stars in the little bedroom,” I say. “I want to keep the stars.”
This plea ties memory to material traces, asserting that love is legible in wear and residue. Preserving the chart and stars resists the erasure of a life stage; it is Renkl’s way of keeping the house bilingual—able to speak both past and present.