Friday, July 08, 2005

Shades of Life

Besides the happy fact that for us swimmers, Lake Michigan is already warm as a bedtime bubblebath, there’s not much good to say about this summer’s searing heat and drought.  The landscape around here is dry bones – the Mojave – just when we’re most craving the shelter of greening shade.

I have been considering the effects of shade lately, since, in my South Bend neighborhood, we’re watching the beginning transformation of a long, ugly stretch of sun-blasted schoolyard sidewalk by a hopeful new planting of trees – nine new saplings of lindens, with heart-shaped leaves, and slender thornless hawthorns.  Long ago, this walk was lined with arching trees that softened the edge of the school’s playing fields and sheltered pedestrians on their way to the nearby farmers’ market or out for an hand-holding evening stroll.  Wiped out by disease a few decades ago, all that was left were the faint depressions in the dog-worn tree-lawn.  But a visionary neighbor, who walks that blazing stretch of concrete several times a week, spearheaded an effort to convince the school corporation that restoring the trees would do more than provide literal shade – they would create inviting spaces for people to gather, so that parents waiting for the end of soccer practice might be more likely to climb out of their cars for conversation, and kids might sprawl under the branches in the softened grass just to shoot the breeze. 

Shade itself is oddly defined not by its presence but by what’s absent – light and heat.  We seem to crave that contrast – watch people in any sunny park gathering in pools of shade, as if they were rooms reserved just for them, with comfortingly defined edges.  Most of us have a bit of Blanche DuBois in us, I suspect – softening shades are more flattering than naked lightbulbs, and softened shades of truth are often easier to take than brutal realities.  The chiaroscuro quality of light played against obscuring shade no doubt offers us more comfortable psychological worlds to inhabit, as well as more aesthetic ones.

My family has just returned from a camping trip to the Southwest, where shade is in mighty short supply, and I confess that it was thrilling, bracing, to see something so foreign to me. When we stood – eyes squinting, in those brilliantly clean stretches of sun-scraped desert, punctuated by the occasional hot-pink cactus bloom or an outlandish thrust of rock – it felt like we were being heated and purified, tempered for better things, greater strength. I didn’t want shade, then – I wanted to feel the blast of the sun, to absorb a heat and light I knew I could stand only because it was temporary.

I tried to imagine living in such a landscape all the time – like the Acoma Pueblo people of New Mexico, who have lived on top of a soaring, sun-parched rock mesa for a thousand years, creating shade for themselves in pale pink adobe shelters with silvery mica windows.  On our visit there, I watched as a daughter skipped along beside her father, playfully ducking and dodging to stay in the narrow sliver of shadow his body cast over her.  “Daddy – stand still – you’re my only shade!” she pleaded… and as a parent I felt that statement reverberate. 

Shade mimics the kind of protective embrace, or reprieve, that we all need at times.  In landscapes – real or psychological – that test us, it helps to know there’s shelter nearby.  It’s no accident that sun-baked Nebraska, and not wooded Wisconsin, is the birthplace of Arbor Day.  Planters of trees, from Johnny Appleseed, who lived for a time in Indiana, to last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Professor Wangari Maathai of Kenya, know that sowing shade also sows the possibility of peace.  The earth’s often beleaguered people need dappled places to gather, shade-softened spaces that allow us to recover from our parched present, or harsh times ahead. And in our neighborhood, keeping our saplings alive, water bucket by sloshing water bucket, during a harsh season of drought, is a reminder that shade doesn’t just happen – we make it ourselves. 

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on July 08, 2005
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