Seeing the light

When I went out to check the mail a few minutes ago, the light from the sun reflecting off the concrete driveway nearly blinded me. How on earth can the pilots stand it? I wondered, as I listened to the roar of aircraft overhead. Well, for one thing, Deb, they're not standing down here in front of a mass of white cement, dumb enough to come out into a hot (and I mean HOT) Mississippi afternoon without sunglasses. No doubt they are prepared for all eventualities. They train for their jobs and they learn from their mistakes.

Apparently I don't. I've lived here long enough to know that you don't walk barefoot on cement during the day down here, nor do you venture outdoors on a sunny day without sunglasses. Yet I did both. By the time I trotted to the end of the driveway to the mailbox, the soles of my feet were scalded and I was navigating by memory alone. I trekked back to the front door through the crunchy grass--which was cooler, but no more comfortable than the driveway that paralled it--hoping the spider I'd spied (and said nasty things about in my one of my posts) hadn't decided to follow me home and lurk about waiting for The Dummy to come outside.

On my dash to the door, I noticed the herbs my daughter and I planted this spring. Even though they're planted in pots and displayed on our potting bench in the shade, most of them are shrivelled and hurting. Looking back on it, it probably would have been kinder if we'd put our tiny, fresh, and fragrant plants--straight from the loving arms of the local Lowe's gardening section--directly into the oven to broil for... oh, say eight or ten hours, rather than submit them to the burning rays of the mid-summer Mississippi sun. What flourishes in someone else's garden in some other state will not necessarily do as well in conditions similar to the inside of an industrial-grade furnace. I hope, for their sake, that I have learned my lesson.

No one--plant, animal or human--likes to live in conditions that don't allow them to flourish. The difference between plants and animals and us humans is that we get to choose, for the most part, the environment in which we exist. If we aren't comfortable, we do something about it. They, on the other hand, are dependent upon us to do whatever is best for them.

I'll try to do better next year.

Until the next time...