Good Shade

I really hate getting up early to walk in the summertime.  I have to hit the floor by 5:00 or 5:15 to be up long enough to  get a cup of coffee, get dressed and be awake enough not to trip over the threshold or veer into a ditch.  This requires going to bed like a geezer around 9:00 or 9:30 the night before - otherwise, I get up too late and start walking too late the next morning.

Starting too late in the summer means anytime after 6:45.  It's light enough by 6:30, but as soon as the sun climbs over the trees it starts to heat up, and it'll be pushing 85 degrees or more by the time we get home.  A late start means not a fitness walk, but a hot trudge with a miserable finish.  A dogs-stay-on-the-porch morning.  So I try to get an early start, but on days when I don’t get up soon enough, we do what we have to do because we're tough and we can take it! (Imagine me with an upraised fist and two dogs headed in the opposite direction.)

There is very little shade at the beginning of our walk - a half mile of gravel changes to a mile of asphalt, and by the time I'm ready to turn around, the pavement is almost too hot for the dogs' feet. We get a little relief when we hit the gravel again, but we save the best for last.  At the other end of the gravel is another half mile of packed dirt.  There's no gravel to poke your shoes or paws.  It's just a wonderful, fabulous, soft surface that stays deliciously cool because of the hackberry trees that shade from both sides.  When we hit the shade, we all breathe a sigh of relief and slow down to enjoy it.

Grouchy folks speak about shade in a negative way:  When someone disparages another's good idea, good fortune or happiness, we call it “throwing shade." Nobody wants drapes anymore: We want big picture windows and skylights to bring light into our indoor living spaces.    Light = good/warm; Dark/shade = bad/trouble/cold, at least in our current polarized way of thinking, where everything has to be all one thing or one way against another. 

It's even a zero-sum game in my garden: some plants come with labels that direct me to plant it in "full sun" and others specify, "shade."  Full sun will fry a shade-loving plant and full shade will kill a sun-dependent plant. Then there is the always-confusing category that requires "bright light," like a Christmas cactus (those are the ones destined to die not by frying or wilting, but by drowning.)

Those of us who are sensitive to the heat appreciate shade the most.  We look forward to it.  When we find it we run to it and stop.  We put patio furniture under it and refuse to leave for any reason.  The Roman stoic, Seneca, is my soul-brother: he added a grove of trees to Homer's sunny Elysian Fields, because apparently it's hotter in Italy than it is in Greece, and when his time came to die, his idea of heaven wasn't an open field.   

The Bible puts a premium on shade.  The desert-dwelling Hebrews were suspicious of both sky-lights - in the Bible, both the sun and the moon were associated with pagan worship - so they opted for being grateful for shady oases: "The Lord is the shade at your right hand. The sun will not harm you by day nor the moon by night." Ps. 1  It must have been great to be nearing the end of a hot journey to see some palm trees waiting just beyond the next ridge.  Jonah so enjoyed the shade under his vine that he was suicidal when a worm wilted it overnight and the sun beat down again.  I totally get that. 

Micah prophesied that one of the perks of the coming of the Messiah was that everyone would get to sit under his own vine or fig tree.  I tried to start a fig tree cutting this spring, but it died, a la Jonah.  But the Passion Vine is coming along.

It's hot outside: Come, Lord Jesus!