A Harvesting Perspective on the Heat

It’s that time of year. We had a heat advisory this week with warnings for children and the elderly and dogs. Death by heat, now there’s something we never really worried about in Minnesota.

It’s funny, because we had a mild July. Mild meaning there weren’t quite so many opportunities to die at 4:30 in the afternoon when you accidentally ducked out from under that shade tree.

What is interesting to me, though, is that if it were February and I was cruising around blog land, I’d come across half-a-dozen posts from my northern friends discussing the darkest, coldest, days of winter and the accompanying angst of waiting it out til spring.

And if I were to head on outdoors in the midst of a bitter January day and get caught wandering through the field when a blizzard hit… I could die before I found my way back to the house. All you have to do is read some Laura Ingalls Wilder to confirm that scenario.

That’s what we have in Minnesota. Death by cold? You betcha!

It is a different challenge set in a different climate. That is all. While those who live on the land in the north build their homes to withstand the biting 40 below winds, we are just beginning to learn how homes were built in the south to overcome the challenges of the heat – before air conditioning.

It can be a struggle and a parameter to work within, and some days it does feel paralyzing and even dangerous.

But it isn’t that different than winter is for those in the north. Eventually spring breaks, wild and green, and there is an exhale in those earliest days of snow melting and grass emerging.

And life goes on here as well. Fall descends like deliverance from a storm and we breathe again, with cooler nights and afternoons spent safely in the dirt, out from underneath the protection of the shade tree.

In the garden, this heat is turning our tomatoes red, making the squash visibly grow from day to day, and yes, wilting away a few of our sweet potato leaves.

It is the bitter with the sweet. The hard and the good. It is life.

For the first time since we put roots down into this little two acre plot we are bringing in a bucket of green beans here, a bucket of tomatoes and squash there. There is still so much we need to give back to this land and so much stumbling through this journey of observing, learning, doing that I quite often still gasp when I see something, anything growing.

And that is driving home that every bean and every squash and every tomato plucked from the vine is a direct provision from the Lord, a miraculous symphony of calories, nutrients, and seeds which we can now save to plant again next year when we will watch to see what unfolds yet again.

This morning I was squatting down between the bush bean rows, picking one here and one there, a large straw hat protecting me from that August sun. Little Abram’s voice rings out: “I found a big fat one. Awesome!” And it repeats with every green bean thereafter. Awesome.

I doubt I will remember the 102 degrees for the day, or the 106 yesterday. It fades as labor pains do when a newborn is tucked away in your arms.

What I think I will remember is the picking of green beans and the exuberant voice of a little man as excited as I am to be partaking in the loveliest of morning activities here… in this place… in this heat… surrounded by these people.