Green shoots

April 2, 2025

March, as I’ve written about previously, is a challenging month in Chicago, for me.

It’s too much brown and gray and withered, and too little evidence that there will ever be green again. That branches will ever be anything but dead sticks. That vines will ever be verdant again. March taunts, sneering at me to abandon hope.

Among March’s taunts are wild weather swings against this brown, gray, dead backdrop. Just this week we’ve had snow, an 80-degree day which brought the tiniest beginnings of buds out on the trees, a tornado watch and torrential rains which knocked them off, and, on the ostensible first day of spring, more snow.

One has to have more faith than I do to get over the March hump without feeling a little panicked that it might stay like this forever. Which brings on despondence. Which becomes a perfect reinforcing doom loop.

Good thing there are at least green shoots. They push up through the dirt, the leaf litter, and the actual litter without a care in the world. They push up into the cement gray sky without needing any coddling or convincing. They do not worry. They are not despondent. They don’t even wonder whether the temperature will drop 50 degrees the next day, imperiling their small little lives and jeopardizing their very existence.

Green shoots don’t care. Nor do crocuses, nor–especially–snowdrops, who come so early they are really pushing their luck around here.

It takes a lot of faith to live like that. Knowing and expecting a verdant future in the face of the blank, bare, brown-gray, dead evidence.

My garden is a case in point. Not only does it have March to contend with, it has dogs.

Only because I have actual photos do I know it ever looked like this.

Staring at this mess as it is now, with its vigorously teeth-pruned shrubs, disrupted potential underground bee nests, holes under fence and beneath trees, I lose heart.

There is too much work. It’s hard to see where to begin. I know for a fact that my favored no-mow, low-water grass seed, or any grass seed for that matter, will be dug up, trampled, scattered, and raced around on, into oblivion. What can become of bulbs that have surely been turned out of their snug homes? And how will the hostas ever contend with being on the figure-8 racetrack loop? My reason tells me there is no point in trying. My March-battered soul tells me there will never be life back here in this muddy mess again.

And here is where my tiny patch of garden becomes a metaphor.

Because everything feels like that right now. Everything feels lost and destroyed and like it will never be restored and beautiful, or even decent and nice, ever again.

Does that sound a little whiny to you, a little dramatic? Are you, dear reader, an overjoyed Republican who thinks we are living in glorious times? Do you thrill to hear what great new dawn is arriving today, the creepily-dubbed “Liberation Day”? You may see things in a completely different way, but here’s why I think nearly everything in our country looks just about as bad as my entirely dead and gone garden.

This administration is literally and openly buying votes in elections, law firms are racing to offer Trump hundreds of millions in pro bono service under threat of destruction, innocent people are being grabbed off streets by masked men without warrants, denied due process, and shipped off to hellish prisons. Our universities–the greatest in the world–are being defunded and silenced, previously eradicated diseases are returning, Meals on Wheels is being kicked to the curb, and food banks all over the country are losing their access to the food that farmers used to sell them. Our national parks are being defunded and opened up to mining and drilling, and a new survey shows that about 50% of our bird population has disappeared. Libraries and museums have been defunded. Veterans have been fired by the tens of thousands; veterans’ services are ending. Cancer research is being cut. Our nation is betraying allies and threatening friends. Americans are losing trust in institutions, the rule of law has no role, Congress’s powers have been stripped, basic civil rights are disappearing, we are standing by and watching a genocide, an invasion, and global natural disasters and doing nothing whatsoever to help. And finally, in a sort of chef’s kiss, segregated services and facilities are actually no longer banned in federal contracts.

It’s pretty much potholes, dirt, and dead weeds as far as I can see, and nothing but grubs in the ground.

But I know, because March is over, and it is April now, that despite appearances, I’m wrong about that— regarding my garden and my nation both.

There are lots of green shoots. In fact, in parts of Hyde Park, whole entire daffodils are up. Forsythia are starting to bust out their bright yellow blossoms. I even have bulbs in my destroyed back yard coming up at odd angles right out of the deepest holes under the tree. Now, to get that garden back in shape it’s going to take a lot of work, and I have to work as if I believe it will eventuate in something. It’s going to require a lot of sweat, which I deeply dislike. And I’m going to need help! I can’t do it alone.

So too for our communities, our institutions, our local and (Lord help us) national governments. Despite what it looks like right now there is deep down green life in our civic and community structures. Though Elon Musk desperately attempted to buy himself a state supreme court election, in Wisconsin there was enough life in the root system that all that cash was a waste, Musk lost, and the will of the people prevailed.

There are green shoots everywhere. We have to cultivate them. We have to till, weed, and water. We have to work believing there will be a return to–if not goodness (I’m no fool awaiting a glorious mythical golden age)–then at least decency, consensus, and measles vaccines. We will have to do this work with our neighbors, face to face, at school board meetings and PTA meetings and church potlucks and art centers and town halls, over beers at our neighborhood hang outs and in our own living rooms, together. We do what is closest to hand, whatever it is we love, in service to others. Is it art? Is it music? Is it working with children? Is it feeding folks who are hungry? Whatever we do we ought to do it now, the best we can, for one another, to support what green shoots remain.

Because there isn’t any other way. We can’t online our way out of this–there is no root system and no life in social media. We can’t pass the work off to others. Democracy belongs to all of us and it requires all of us, tilling away, in small ways sometimes, quietly, and at other times, very loud and large. Doing this work faithfully will yield that green imagined future full of shade and dappled light and flowers. Those little green shoots are the proof it is possible.

Thanks for stopping by today. I’d love to see your springtime green shoots or actual flowers if you have any coming up in your yard or neighborhood. Or hear about any actions you’re taking, or planning, toward a verdant civic future.