If This Isn’t Nice…

Getting the Hinckley House was a pretty good idea, but getting one of these hammocks was an even better one. I ran about a zillion errands yesterday and then had a very busy morning/afternoon, including moving a dining room table upstairs — a job which, in retrospect, only an idiot would think was meant for a single person (Rob’s away for a while). So by about 6:00pm, I was really happy to find a couple of trees in the backyard (the mowed part between the house and the pond) and quickly hang the hammock.

Not too shabby a view, right? There’s a goose family that lives on the pond, and I was able to watch them wander around near the shore, nibbling on weeds. All I could hear was frogs’ singing and the occasional squawk of a dumb pheasant somewhere in the woods. On Thursday night, I was in Minneapolis, and at one point in the evening, I paused whatever I had been doing to listen to the frogs, except then I realized that there wasn’t even anything making noise similar to frogs (except maybe the tinnitus in my left ear). When I was drifting off to sleep later, I was jolted awake by a perfectly normal plane going overhead — clearly I’ve gone a bit rural when it comes to the sounds I expect in my environment.

Anyway, as I relaxed in the hammock, I kept thinking of that Vonnegut quote, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’ And then I packed it all up and went back inside for some more manual labor.