nobody move

i think i need a hammock for my dorm room. so it's a single... no room for it. i did some research. something comfortable like a nicaraguan weave. hammocks :)

i was laying outside in our old pawley's island rope hammock this afternoon. the sun was still angled up in the sky, flitting through the shifty leaves, i had forgotten my sunglasses. i rolled my legs out and rolled my body the other direction, lessening the sun-to-eye contact by a degree or two. angled toward it, little camping pillow and a book. an almost cold sunkist hugged in a sovereign seas koozie balanced precariously on a clump of grass below. one-handed reading, one-armed head-propping... one eye closed, one lazy. every now and then a courageous flying winged oblong would get flicked off my shirt or shorts. occasionally a light but weighty humid breeze would shower book, body, and hammock with hard, green little tree things. one caught in a fold of my shirt and i picked it up thumb-to-forefinger and prepared to toss it back towards the heights it fell from but, staring up into the shifting green and blue, my fingers moved to my mouth instead. so i bit it, the tiny hard thing. hard to keep between the front teeth, the slippery little treeball. but i got a thought of a taste, less planty than sour, and got curious. dropped the green ball in my mouth and ventured a couple soft exploratory bites. tasted like sour cherries, not altogether bad but surprisingly potent.

forgot these were cherry trees... just not the fat, voluptuous cherry kind. these are tall, with rough chunky bark, looking quite hard but also brittle. who knows? they've lasted many storms. when i was done i went and rubbed the face of the brownest eyes of the sweetest dog i know. noticed the swing hanging idly from another branch of the tree. i was too scared to sit on it, lest it splinter and disentegrate. my father made it a long time ago for me out of a mispainted sign forbidding big dumb animals like horses from walking through our backyard searching for trails. the sign itself is still white on the bottom, with some black lettering - simply an old plank of wood with a rope threaded through the middle and tied below. probably still hung on the original rope, green on brown now from mildew, the top of which long grown into the branch it hangs from. brings back memories.

see what i just did? right up there. i didn't need to say that. jesus, i need to stop, don't i? ;)