hanging around

My skin glistened in the sun and I felt a bead of sweat roll down the side of my face.  I twisted my body to comfortably lie in the hammock, its gracefully swung arms contouring perfectly to the notches of my spine.  Beneath my shades I read Nabokov’s “Lolita,” but my eyes were strained and my head woozy from the brightness of the sun, so I set his book down on the grass and watched little gnats drift through the summer day surrounding me.

I shifted my shoulders over one side of the hammock, swung my legs over the other and saw the world upside down.  The trees’ green leaves above were still-- rays of light stinging through their patchwork.  

My dad’s flower patch was being swooned over by dashing bumble bees and delicate butterflies while I lifted my arms over my head and let them dangle down, as my hair did, so my finger tips grazed blades of grass.  Nothing around me, other than the bugs, was really moving.  The world had slowed for the summer months, taken a break from her normal hectic life just as I was doing.

The air was not sticky, but I felt the heat of summer oppress me with her pregnant glow.  The insides of my palms were damp and I constantly fluttered the bottom of my tank top to create my own breeze.  I didn’t mind being hot though.  I sat up to take my sunglasses off, a slight dizziness throwing me off balance because of the blood flow that’d just been rushed to my head, and when I did, a brilliant display of those bright summer colors came into view.  The grass was that vivid shade of green that you only see when the sun is at its brightest, the sunflowers’ petals as dazzling as the sun itself, the sky as breathtakingly blue as tropical waters.         

An ant started to crawl on my toe, but instead of spooking and flicking it off I let it discover my skin— it was comforting to have Mother Nature embrace me enough to let her littlest creatures accept me.  I fell asleep in a patch of cool itchy grass, baking slowly along with the rest of my backyard, somehow becoming more of a creature than a human.