Jessie’s Reviews > Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss > Status Update

That hot land is a part of me, as a fundamental to my shaping as a family member, and I would have remembered its precise features with an ache of homesickness even if I had never seen it again.

Inside the nest box, the baby birds are powerless, vulnerable to the fury of the pitched summer sun, of the house sparrow's beak. Bounded on all sides by their sheltering home, they are a meal the rat snake eats at its leisure.

The miracle isn't happening in the sky at all. It's happening in the damp weeds of an ordinary backyard, among last year's moldering leaves and the fragrant soil turned up by moles.

They are looking at me as if I am the sun, as if they had been cold every day of their lives until now.