Margaret Renkl is one of my favorite writers. She lives in Nashville, TN and often writes about her hometown in both observations about what’s happening in her backyard as well as local and state politics. I am most familiar with her opinion pieces that appear regularly in the New York Times, but I have just started listening to an audio recording of her book, A Crowd of Crows, which has been described as “a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year.” I highly recommend the book and following her in the NYT as well.

Today’s opinion piece, entitled “How to Count Butterflies” describes in Renkl’s gentle prose her joy in walking in her fall garden and seeing the butterflies who are to be found feasting upon the various native plants she has carefully chosen to propagate to encourage butterflies and other beneficial insects to stay and hopefully reproduce.

Most of us can recognize monarch feasting on native milkweed as seen in the photo below.

Butterflies, like so much of our native insects, are in a precipitous decline, due to lose of habitat and global warming. I am a terrible observer of what’s going on about me, but even I can remember times past when there were a lot more insects and butterflies buzzing or flitting around us, but Renkl, a careful observer and documentarian, is a much more reliant narrator.

She closed today’s piece with the following: “Like so much of the still-living world, the butterflies in my pollinator garden are a reminder of what I most need to remember. That we must find some way to keep faith in the future. That we must find some way to save them.” And I might add, ourselves.

We can’t give up hope, but we must do all that we can to save and protect our natural world.