Cry Hammock

We have a hammock now, my daughters and I. It’s slung loose and low between two big oaks in my backyard, right near the raspberry bushes and beneath the neighbor’s genuflecting branches of pine.

I wasn’t really keen on buying it. I didn’t want to be wrapped up in the kind of string used to tie white paper around rib roasts and then suspended in the air like one of those inflatable bunnies you see in trees around Eastertime.

The girls and I stood looking at hammocks in Lowe’s when it was still muddy and rainy, upstate New York’s poor excuse for spring. One thing we don’t need is a hammock, I said.

The one thing we do need, Madeleine said firmly, is a hammock. She was convinced that buying a hammock was good way to symbolize our faith that summer would eventually come.

I found her optimism irritating. We didn’t need a hammock. We needed two freaking days in a row without rain. We needed to finish raking last fall’s leaves so the dandelions could make a fresh assault our scrappy lawn.

We needed the damage from the ice dam repaired. We needed to take off our snow tires. We needed the glacial cirques winter had scoured into our driveway mended with some hot tar and tamped down by someone with the strength of a behemoth.

I bought the hammock.

I bought it, muttering all kinds of warnings in the checkout line.

“This is really not necessary. Just consider this part of your birthday present. And I’ve already spent too much on your birthday present. And I don’t know where we’re going to be able to hang this. Or who’ll hang it for us.”

What a pleasant shopping companion I was. Then I hauled the cumbersome box out to the car like Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross to Golgotha. We shoved it in the Camry, then stored it in the garage and then one day we managed to get it hung.

And one day the rain stopped. And one day the kids got out of the hammock long enough for me to get into it. It was still cold out. But it wasn’t raining. And I brought a blanket with me.

And then it happened: I fell in love with my hammock.

It doesn’t really work to lie in a hammock with a blanket—it leaves your bottom cold. But that didn’t matter. A cold bottom was a small price to pay for that dreamy feeling of suspension, the cradling grip of the mesh and the slow and steady rocking as the breeze moved it back and forth, back and forth.

At last spring has made its way into full-blown summer. I’m discovering there really isn’t much worth doing that can’t be done in a hammock.

For example, Madeleine and Linnea can wait in the hammock while I go to the grocery store. Then, they can carry in all the packages and put them away while I curl up with this week’s copy of People magazine.

But you don’t have to do only lowbrow reading in the hammock. I’ve got a lot of serious reading to do for the classes I’ll teach in the fall. Lutheran theology, world religions, the rise of fundamentalism—if you have to read this kind of stuff, isn’t it best done in a hammock?

The same goes for the checkbook. Yes, it’s tricky. The bills do tend to blow all over the yard. The Zebra mechanical pencil that I use in my checkbook—makes erasing my errors in subtraction all that much easier—falls through the mesh a lot. Getting in and out of the hammock—first because I forgot the stamps, then because I forgot the return-address labels, then because I need a refill on my seltzer—is tedious. But not nearly as tedious as doing bills on the dining room table with the light fixture swinging over my head like an interrogation lamp.

And there is a lot of fun stuff to do in the hammock. Madeleine and I have learned how to play backgammon in the hammock. That’s a mouthful to say and even harder to do. It requires balance and poise and the skill to resist sneezing. I like backgammon in the hammock because I win more often this way—which is to say I’m less of a loser than usual.

Hammocks are custom-made for cuddling because your arms and legs are thrown together willy-nilly like a supine version of Twister. The Puritans could never have enforced bundling if they had slept in hammocks.

On the other hand, I think hammocks are pretty chaste environments. I’ve heard tell they can withstand the slings and arrows of fevered passion, but I’m not sure I trust my sources.

Which gets round to things that can’t be done in the hammock. And if I’m honest, there’s a lot I have to get out of the hammock to do. Like writing this column.

But I’m finished with that right now. And I don’t want to think about the other things I can’t do in a hammock.

Instead, I want to think about fixing a little plate of stinky French cheeses and fresh blackberries. I want to think about pouring a glass of icy vinho verde. I want to think about balancing all that on a table with a citronella candle, and all of it within easy reach from my swaying, mesh womb in the trees.

—Jo Page

 You can contact Jo Page at jopage@graceniska.org.

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