Spending the Currency of Perspiration

I am not a heat-loving guy.  In truth, there isn't really all that much of it in Iowa - a couple of months on average, unlike the oppressive expanse of it across the calendar in the Texas of my rearing - but heat is heat, regardless; which accounts for my frequent consternation.  Despite the opulence of the season outside, my waking hours are increasingly spent indoors.  Early mornings are tolerable, and I use them to keep as many of the garden weeds at bay as I can.  Lori is more intrepid.  I arrive early, she remains late.  Between us, we are keeping up, if only barely.  The vegetable beds are thriving and growing; salad greens and turnips frequent our table, and the braising greens are coming into their own.  The green bean bushes have blossomed, along with the squashes and cucumbers, and adolescent tomatoes are burdening their branches.  Berries, both cultivated and wild, we manage to glean as we pass their snagging reaches.  The peppers and cabbages won't be far behind.  We'll wince at the water bill when it eventually arrives, but the flavors that bill has enabled will be some balm for the financial pain.

But while the vegetable garden's invitation is primarily gastronomic, the flower beds proffer other inducements.  The butterfly bush is awash in blossoms and, as advertised, butterflies.  The day lilies - justifying their biblical splendor that shames even Solomon - open like a ballet in slow motion.  The iris, the poppies, the daisies and echinacea, the towering sunflowers and spindly zinnias - the beds are awash in them.

But the blooms are ephemeral.  They arrive as if by magic, and just as suddenly disappear.  These are their glory days.

These days that we spend largely inside.  Avoiding the warming sun that has beckoned the color.

I'll get acclimated.  Eventually.  As much as I dislike the assault of them on my skin and the drain of them on my constitution, these, too, are days "that the Lord has made."  Comfort and ease are no substitute for the beauty that swabs and dots them.  It is a common passage.  What practicing scales is to a pianist, what calisthenics are to athletes, what knife scars are to a chef and iambic pentameter is to a poet, intemperate days are to a human aching to master the art of being fully alive.  Living through the onerous and strenuous disciplines is the only door opening into the beauty they evoke and beckon us to celebrate.  And savor.

It is summer - not my favorite temperature, but my favorite benefactor.  And so I'll get up in the morning and embrace it.  There is work to do, but also beauty to attend.  The blooms won't be around for long.  And perspiration is a small enough price to pay for the glory of embracing them.