My sister has a cloth hammock. It is not cloth all the way through, just the part that you lie back in and look at the clouds. The cloth part is set up between two metal tubes that connect with pins that pop through the hole when you get them in the right spot. The hammock is portable and can be moved easily.
I would like to be that hammock. Specifically, I would like to be the cloth part of that hammock. It seems to be giving itself up completely to nature. When a breeze hits the cloth, it flutters and flops around the metal bars like a creature with no spine. When there is no wind and the noon sun is beating straight down, the hammock does not move. It is taking a nap.
If there is nobody in the hammock, is there a job for it? If I was the hammock, would I be OK hanging around all day doing nothing? Maybe I am not doing nothing. Maybe I am there listening to the birds call to each other as they play in the tree tops. If I am set up near the beach I can be listening for the tide rolling in and out. At a campsite I can watch the campfire reach out of the stone fire pit. In a backyard I can listen to the neighbors as they have dinner on their back deck.
I think I would be OK doing nothing. I think I would be OK sitting in between the two metal posts that hold me up and keep me from blowing down the beach in the wind. The two metal posts could be my companions, maybe my friends.
We would talk about our day. We would talk about how we had to work hard to hold up the fat guy who napped in us yesterday. We would talk about the game the two little girls were playing while they sat in us with their coloring books. We would talk about the Blue Jay who lands on the post every morning to eat her breakfast of beetles.
At the end of the day after the fat guy and the little girls and the Blue Jay have come and gone, I would rest under the moonlight. The dew that forms overnight would cool me down after my day of hanging in the sun. The metal posts would say their goodnights and we would all wait for another day of doing nothing.
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