Today, I got a great deal on a hammock. Our home has a large, park-like backyard with towering oaks and maples. We smell the lilies of the valley in May and the lilacs in June. Come July, the sunflowers have grown way past our heads, the astibles have turned brown, and the hostas have started to flower. It’s just always seemed like a yard for a family-sized hammock, and I’ve wanted a hammock since we moved into our home seven years ago. I wanted a hammock to doze in, to read books in, to lay around and tickle my kids in, to just swing and enjoy the summer season. Nothing quite says summer like afternoon hours passed in a hammock.
I got the deal at an “end of the summer” sale. End of the summer? I remember four weeks ago feeling a little bored. Now, I’m starting to think about preparing next semester’s syllabi, and I’ve pulled out the school supply list.
I look at the family calendar and I see meetings, rehearsals, soccer games, etc. scheduled every day of the week this week, and I wonder when/how it got to be this way? I know this is the life of the modern family, but it seems just a little not quite right to have everyone going in so many different directions. I want to eat with my family around the dinner table all together at least four or five nights a week. I want to read books to my daughters and engage in random chit-chat with them. I want to slow down. The summer is slipping away so quickly. I want us all to just be for a little while.
Sure, these obligations beckon, but I suspect that everything and everyone will be okay if I’m not around to pass out a pamphlet or make a little speech. The work will get done or not get done, and in a year, someone will come along and redo it or undo it, and none of it will really get noticed by anyone.
But my daughters will remember reading their favorite books and chatting and tickling and watching the sunflowers grow while swinging in the hammock and smelling the fleeting green and sunshine of our waning summer days.
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July 21, 2008 at 2:01 pm
tyler s clark
You mentioned more names of flowers in one post than I think are in my entire vocabulary. This is one problem I have with poetry, unfortunately. One usually has to be up on their horticulture to catch half the allusions.
July 21, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Woman at Large
How true, how true. I remember as a child, wasting entire afternoons on my back under the big old willow tree in the back yard, giving names to the shapes taken by the clouds. Now, a stolen hour in the chaise longue is something that has to be planned ahead of time! But there’s no better way to read a summertime book (and they are ALL summertime books!)
July 21, 2008 at 6:10 pm
crseum
Ohhhh Don’t say waning! It’s still only July!!! I just want to hold onto it as long as humanly possible. (Like I want to hold my babies) I agree completely. Pamphlets will get passed and speeches will get made with or without any one of us. But those girls already reflect the time you spend nurturing their little souls and that will last for lives to come.
July 22, 2008 at 12:37 am
lucy
Tyler: I’m tempted to keep listing flowers from my yard, just to vex you and expose your horticultural deficiencies.
Crse: You’re so sweet! It’s especially difficult for me this summer because my baby (my baby) is going to school in the Fall. Mommy is not going to handle it well, I have a feeling.