Hammock Days

The dog days of summer are here, and as I step outside into the thick, soupy air that buzzes with the vibrato cries of cicadas, I am taken back to those lazy, hazy, crazy days of my youth when I would pass the time in the backyard hammock doing absolutely nothing.

The hammock hung beneath the great catalpa tree that lorded over our old Pennsylvania farmhouse. The tree was huge—seventy feet tall with a wide, spreading canopy that gave shade to dogs, cats, humans, and any other creature that sought refuge beneath its beneficent arms.

There I would lie for hours on lazy August afternoons when it was too hot to do anything else. We didn’t have many luxuries in our family, but that hammock was one of them. I loved hanging suspended in the air like a mummy taking in the view of the majestic catalpa with its floppy elephant-ear leaves and long seed pods hanging like fruit from its branches.

It was so hot, I could see the heat shimmering off the dry brown grass. Nothing was moving, no birds flying, not a breath of wind stirring the tasseled corn in the field. Across the way, I could see our horse Lucky standing still as a statue in the barn, her tail lazily swatting away horseflies.

It seemed the only thing alive were the unseen cicadas shaking their maracas from the trees to attract a mate. Their cries rose to a pitch and fell away, before being taken up again by another lovestruck Romeo farther away.

We rarely saw the cicadas but knew they were up there because of the shells they left behind on the catalpa tree when they molted. How could such a tiny creature make such a loud sound? It made me want to root for all the underdogs of the world.

When I grew tired of looking up at the tree, I would turn over and watch the ants crawl in the dirt. Such industrious creatures they were, going back and forth carrying their cargo. The heat didn’t stop them from doing their work.  

Time moved so slowly back then, probably because we didn’t think much about it. School was out, and we had no schedule, no calendar, no to-do lists. One day flowed into the next like slow-moving stream that went on forever, or so it felt.

There is something to be said for doing nothing, for it is then that we begin to notice the small things in life and how mightily they roar. I think of the famous poem by Richard Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”—

Over my head I see the bronze butterfly

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine, behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year’s horses

Blaze up like golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

There are days—more of them as I grow older—that I feel like this, that I have wasted my life in pursuing titles and awards and fame and other things that didn’t matter, and in the process missed the precious details of life that can be gleaned in the stillness of lying on a hammock on a hot summer afternoon.

“Remember to stop and smell the roses,” my mother used to remind me as I hurried out the door on the way to work. How right she was.

Now that my income-earning years are (mostly) behind me, I am intent on spending as much time as possible on the hammock. I consider it catch-up time.