Spring in Chicago and the mysterious beginning of the next round

April 18, 2023

Ever retro, I am starting a new blog. I plan to post here weekly.

So welcome to this space–a place to read and share stories, recipes, whatnot. I’ve long written about public education but there is just so much more to think about.

Like, for instance, how terribly difficult the transition is from winter to spring. We just went through this in Chicago, and we’re not all the way there yet. March in the midwest this year was one for the ages: following a winter of very little snow and negligible sunlight, March was temperature extremes, sideways freezing rain blowing in your face, and the very familiar, ubiquitous, despair-inducing cloud cover (“Stygian darkness,” aptly labeled by my friend Elaine).

Well spring never comes easily to Chicago. Petulant, yet grim, spring seems to need to be dragged out of winter. Raging winds knock over trash cans and blow down tree limbs. Everything is dirt, and dead, and brown, just as far as the eye can see. Looking around outside in March you know, for a fact, that these dead sticks everywhere will never ever leaf out again, and you think–this world will be terribly ugly forever.

March’s unrelenting cloud cover can be punctuated by pops of leafless, shadeless 80 degree days, for which you cannot find sandals. Then suddenly it’s cold again but woops, you already put away your coats. If you suffer from seasonal depression, March is maybe the worst time of all because you have just entirely used up all your resources getting through the winter and yet here you are still mired in a sunless void. If you have school aged kids this is when things start to feel extremely haggard: I think everyone deserves a prize for getting this close to the finish line with shoes that fit and homework that’s not permanently lost. The ambitious among us (note: not me) are engaging in spring cleaning which means you’re mired in dirt and dishevelment indoors just as much as out. March in Chicago is exhausted and grimy with its oily gutter puddles of uncertain provenance and tangled banks of broken dried up grasses in the parkway. Along streets in my neighborhood, the smallest earliest bulbs struggle to push up through the leaf litter and actual litter. My favorite outdoor game in the spring is–Is That Flowers Or Is That Trash?

March at our house was also a gut punch. The end of March marked the end of what worked in our little rescue terrier Edie’s cancer treatment. Four months into her low-key regimen, one morning Edie wouldn’t eat, couldn’t keep anything down, and wouldn’t swallow a pill, and I knew this was it. Until that day she had cheerfully taken her pills, eaten her dry chow with rotisserie chicken 3 times a day, and prowled with me all over the neighborhood for a couple of hours every day. We loved to be outdoors–her for the chance of a waylaid chicken bone, me scanning branches for signs of buds. She always wore a bright red coat. We walked very briskly. I was caught off guard by how rapidly she went downhill.

Mixing Edie’s increasing sickness with the general awfulness of March meant for more than my usual late-winter angst. I could do nothing to help her, and there would be no hope of progress–two states in which I hate to find myself. My resources for coping with such times are thin. It takes practice and patience to get comfortable with the necessary ambiguity of the in-between, the not-yet, the not-sure, the what-the-hell. Dried up times show me how undeveloped is my ability to be quiet, and still, and just stare at the thing that is before me, what is, and accept that, simply and exactly as it is.

In her final, end of March days, my dog and I sit together in the quiet, she is not hurting, she is not uncomfortable, she is just tired, and tired, and tired. I barely leave her side. She wags her tail when I return to her. She surprises us with a burst of barking when someone rings our doorbell. I look out the window at the dead things, and wait for this interminable season to pass.

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Now it is April, and I will have to prowl around the neighborhood without my little friend. Even for a pet our hearts get a little broken when they’re gone. And to me, a little bit of a broken heart feels like being tired and disorganized, and I am noticing every day how much Edie kept me on track. Her daily super annoying barking in my face at 4:30 or 5 would cease as soon as I went in the kitchen to make dinner, whereupon she would stand quietly and watch me cook. Her putting herself to bed in her crate every night was a cue for me to close the computer and go to bed myself. And walking her three times a day kept me moving. Somehow now I have to manage all this by my own will. I’ve noticed of late, puzzlingly, that when I’m still sitting on my rear at 7 p.m., there seems to be no dinner.

Mostly I avoided crying until a card came in the mail yesterday. It was from the wonderful vet practice that diagnosed Edie in December, saved her from death’s doorstep then, and gave her our good regimen and four more nice months together. The card was signed by every vet and tech who had worked with her, like a high school yearbook. Each one had true sweet things to say about taking care of Edie (who had been inpatient there for about 10 days!). Stapled inside the card was a packet of wildflower seeds. The entire presentation made me burst into tears.

And that’s just the thing. There’s a true thing about March, and about death, that is also a gift, that those vets innately know. The strange gift of March is that deep within its deadness is locked the mysterious beginning of the next round.

This was illustrated vividly, if alarmingly, by a bundle of decorative curly willow sticks I bought from Home Depot in December and stuck in backyard pots with pine boughs on the off chance anyone happened to visit the yard during the winter and they might prefer to look at such a pot instead of last summer’s dead petunias. Well, last week I was pulling out the pine boughs, it being April and all, and lo and behold that curly willow stick has gone and sprouted leaves. Yikes!

Willows, it turns out, are perfect exemplars of the totipotency of plants. Anyone who really gardens knows about this. It’s the reason cuttings can turn into a whole new plant. The reason a formerly dead stick can sprout leaves. Totipotency is the innate potential of a plant cell to produce the entire plant (a characteristic not shared with mammalian cells in quite the same way). What this means is, from a bundle of big box store sticks, now I have a whole bunch of baby willow trees. Life was in them even though they were no longer connected to a living thing. It is in there, it is always in there, waiting to come out, no matter how terrible things look from where you are.

That renewal–for sticks, for hearts, for everything as far as the eye can see–is astonishing. It is always astonishing. And very, very regular. Somehow March always manages to turn into April, and then even May, when real, full-on spring dumps everything it has on us in an avalanche of blossoms and blindingly bright days. And a scattered packet of wildflower seeds will fill up the patch of parkway outside our front window with random raggedy flowers about shoulder high to a terrier.

Miracle so common as to be banal, every year out of nowhere we get this barrage of life, the renewal of all things, again, as sure as morning follows night, as sure as death follows life, as sure as life follows death.