"It would be. The place may be dead, but at least some of it was in hibernation, waiting for the light to return."

There's something uplifting there. A kind of reward for what they achieved, that the the plants had persevered lying dormant until a potential return of the sun.

"The plants that came up previously seemed like they had already died, like they'd been reanimated and were going through the motions rather than sprouting. These are actually growing." He kneels down, brushing the snow from the leaf of a nearby green shoot, that will be a shrub one day. "Do you think animals will return too? Real birds would be nice to hear."