The willow cutting that I planted this spring, as previously shown here, is still alive and healthy. The stump from the willow that it replaced, which died last year, already had rotted enough by last weekend to come up easily when I tugged on it. Now I just need to spread more mulch to cover the base of that stump, and the replacement willow should look pretty good next year.

There seems to be a lesson in all of this for me. When the willows started dying back because of climate change a few years ago, I felt gloomy about it, like all my efforts to keep them alive were useless and I would be stuck with a backyard full of ugly stumps forever, or I’d have to pay some huge amount to hire a landscaping company to dig them out and totally replant everything.

But of course, that wasn’t true. No matter how bad things may look in the moment—whether in the natural world or in life more generally—there’s often going to be space for improvement after allowing some time for the unwanted stuff to rot away.