Seeking shade

It’s been a hot, hot day. I sought the cool of the evening down in the den. I haven’t sat in the den for a while, but though around it the trees lengthen their branches and nettles and thistles push up through years of old leaves, inside it remains the same. The same tall trunks, narrow and wide; the same gnarled and twisted trunks crossed and propped at strange angles. The same crunch of dry leaves underfoot, and the same rustle of this year’s leaves up above.

There isn’t much coolness to find even here, though. The direct light of the sun may rarely reach in, but the overheated air oozes in past branches and twigs and fills the space, closing in around me. The breeze that must be in the tops of the trees, making those leaves chatter away, doesn’t make it this far down and in.

I sit in the hot stillness. It’s noisy outside: Saturday evening traffic on the hill just a few hundred yards away; the laughter of neighbours’ children who have a bouncy castle in their garden this weekend. The noise reaches me, but yet is distant; the den has its own silence within that pushes back against the sounds without.

I hear small footsteps through the leaves. Muntjac? No, Jemma the cat, come to see what I’m up to. She noses around; startles at a twig buried in leaves and dislodged as I move a foot; stretches up a tree trunk and thinks about climbing. She settles, though, for sitting on an old fallen statue under one of the trees (set there before the trees grew so wide, and knocked over, I suspect, by badgers looking for bugs, and too heavy for me to set upright). She keeps watch, though whether over me, or on guard against the world outside, I’m not sure. Perhaps it is both.

I don’t think any deep, meaningful, insightful thoughts down here this evening. I think about heat, and noise, and the leaves that are knee-deep for Jemma. I think about her curiosity and her desire to monitor all that is going on. I wonder if I should tidy the den up a bit - cut back a few of the new slender branches grown around the entrance; cut down the holly sapling growing valiantly in the shady space inside, and getting in the way; remove what look to be the remains of rabbit hutches, left here to disintegrate. But not on this hot evening, that’s for sure.

This evening is for sitting, for seeking any scrap of relief from heat that I can find. For seeing the small and simple things around me, just as they are, whether “beautiful”, or “ordinary”, or “untidy”, or whatever other labels I might apply to them. And for remembering that God walked in that first, perfect garden “at the time of the evening breeze”, and surely can still be encountered in our gardens and green spaces too.

And that’s enough.