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For Rent

I'm gonna start selling rental slots in my hammock. At fifty cents a minute, guests can suspend themselves above the ground and their worries. By design, a hammock orients your attitude, forehead and toes toward the sky. Facing the curve of the world, my guests might wonder if the membrane between our world and "space" is hard like a robin's egg or viscous like the snotty plasma of a cell. Or maybe they will search the stratosphere for contrails, imagining the itineraries and distances of the soaring passengers. Or maybe their thoughts will tumble like clouds over meeting confirmations or back-to-school sales or speaker wire or taboo flesh or roasted zucchini or blood.


In 10-minute blocks, my hammock guests can lull the jabbering narrative of their day to a dull hum. The hard angles of power lines and rooftops etch into a view sometimes mottled with the cotton candy dissolve of clouds and, sometimes, scattered with the white embers of stars. Always, always the hammock dislodges ideas and memories. Always, always, the sky accepts what we must release.

If guests opt to sway in the hammock, tree tops will playfully peek into their ken. I once offered myself to a man who challenged me to describe the trees along our rehearsal-romantic stroll. He'd read somewhere that describing a tree was the mark of a truly great writer. I'd wanted to love him so badly. The two of us, I knew, would've been great together (and by "knew," I mean "vividly imagined"). He liked me too, just not enough to return my messages in a timely manner or follow through on his promised visits. I thought about him during a recent hammock session, eyeing the tapestry edges of leaves. I should call him. Thank him for being a good dude and decidedly not gobbling my eager heart whole.

I've got my own good dude now. One year and counting toward a lifetime. The universe held him in reserve and only released him into my path when both of us were ready.  He loves the hammock, too. And me. Maybe my hammock guests will hover above the pieces of themselves, too. Hook their roaming thoughts to a backyard breeze and sway back and forth like a pendulum spell. Cradled in an amniotic zero gravity, I hope my guests will allow their bones and spirit and past aches to still and rest.

No matter how my guests choose to invest their time, my brochures, website and prime time commercials will invite one and all to recline in my backyard, peer beyond their skyline of toes and experience how, in a hammock, heaven is actually closer than it appears.

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