Hammock Haven

This is Mihret cuddling in her Nona and Pappa's hammock with her Nona in Evansville, IN. I learned hammock hunkering (and Mihret cuddling) from the best!


April 21, 2010
Post-Crescent column: Warm weather puts me in the swing of things

You know spring has sprung at the Patterson house when the hammock is in full swing.

I'm not sure when my fascination with the freestanding, woven-rope-on-poles resting place first began. It seems like a hideaway I've always wanted to have.

Although far from an athletic child, I made up for it in imagination, and for that reason, I was always outdoors in good weather. I unfolded my share of picnic blankets and even read books perched on the highest bars of my swing set, but the hammock was a treat that never materialized.

A fan of the "Star Wars films" as a child of the '80s, I was well aware that the Ewoks, the teddy-bear-like helpers of Luke Skywalker and his sister Leia, had hammocks. Their village on the forest moon of Endor was pocketed with them. Perhaps that's what first caught my attention.

In the books and magazines I read, both fiction and nonfiction, adventurers and travelers always carried their trusty hammocks, whether they were National Geographic explorers or the hobbits of the Shire in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth.

I received my first hammock as a gift from my parents a few years ago. When the snow stays away long enough for our first tulips to show their greenery, we haul the hammock out of its garage hibernation and set it up in its place of honor under our lone apple tree.

Suspended between the hustle of the last hour and the bustle of the next, when I'm in the hammock with a good read and an iPod, everything seems to look, well, up.

I savor my chosen solitude and I take the time for myself that's so hard to get when my feet are still on the ground.

Now, if only I could put up a hammock in the basement for the off-seasons.
-By Kara Patterson, Post-Crescent staff writer/www.postcrescent.com