Hammock

I have always had a love affair with hammocks. Something about the easy way that they hang invites one to really relax. My parents always had one strung between two trees in the yard or two posts on our back porch—I even slept outside one night, imagining what sailors of old felt like swinging in the dark below-decks. I have happy memories of a certain hammock strung between palm trees in the Florida Keys from a girlhood vacation. Then there was the hammock that hung from Georgia pine trees in the backyard of our first house—I sat with my babies in that hammock and spent many happy hours snuggling and snoozing. So it was with nostalgia and admiration that I sat this past winter in the Bahamas in a hammock chair swinging from a Casuarina tree on Volleyball Beach on Stocking Island. It was a beautiful hammock with a beautiful view.

One day as I sat there chatting with some young folks who had pulled up in their dinghy, I learned that the maker of the hammock was a young woman named Snow, and that she was staying on a sailboat in the anchorage. Later I met Snow and complimented her handiwork. She has a company called The Sailor’s Bed and works in a coastal North Carolina town making and selling her hammocks. It was perfectly logical, then, to order one of her hand-made hammocks to string between the supports of our arch and “hang out” in the breeze above the water.

Sailor's Bed 

The hammock is everything I had hoped for—a relaxing place to sip a glass of wine while the sun sets, or to read and rest on a weekend morning. It is like a little oasis in the middle of the very busy, very noisy household of which I am a part, a one-hour vacation getaway. The joy I get from that hammock is augmented by the fact that I met the weaver—that she, like me, loves sand and sun and water and boats. Like everything else about our lifestyle, so much of what we enjoy has to do with the who and not just the what.