Ah, it is indeed a rough life.
After last night's torrential rains, this morning was clear and bright. The world washed clean. I was able to avoid yard work in the morning because it was still too wet to mow or weedeat. After lunch, I felt it was my duty to set up the hammock I had gotten for Christmas because my old one had finally given out. It is a Hatteras, rope hammock, the largest one made. So about 2:00 took it down to trees by the water and hung it up. Fit right perfectly where the old one had been. I sank back into the nice, soft, clean, new ropes and rocked gently. My hammock site is about five feet from the water. Well, not quite -- we have high bank property, so there's a rock cliff about 10 feet high (which protects us nicely from any short term global warming) with the small private beach and the rocky islet at the foot of it (the islet is an island at high tide and part of the property at low tide and is a spectacular place to go gunnysacking. But that wasn't today's agenda.) But since you're right there on the edge of the low cliff it feels as though you're only five feet from the water. So I lay there under the large pines looking up through them at the blue sky, and out across the sparkling water toward Vancouver Island and though how tough a life this is. Did enough reading that I could feel I wasn't totally wasting time, but the point of a hammock, for me at least, isn't to read; the point of reading in a hammock, for type A personalities, is that you can lie back and totally relax and read a sentence and spend five minutes gazing at the gulls and the cormorants and once today an eagle, no river otters today but there often are, no whales going by, wrong time of year, but there will be, and feel the warm sun filtering through the trees and squint a wee bit because the sun off the water is pretty bright and feel totally alone because we're on a point and while there are houses only a few hundred feet away, they're all behind you and behind thick stands of trees and might as well not be there, and you can read another sentence and close your eyes for five minutes, and maybe even read a full page or two before closing your eyes and swinging the hammock gently, and because you're reading, you feel that it isn't, despite appearances, a complete waste of time.
Ah, it is indeed a tough life! |
