sunny afternoon

it's about 10pm and i'm actually a little sleepy. i woke up before sunrise this morning and have been busy doing some more cleanup and packing. it was pretty nice to be up during regular hours for the first time in two weeks.

i spent the afternoon washing laundry and enjoying the nice weather. i forgot to bring a book with me, so i sat in this chair with a small attached desk that must have been taken from a high school and stared at the washing machine. the afternoon sun coming in through the window was warm and a nice breeze was coming in through the open doors. i only watched the washing machine for a few minutes before nodding off.

when i was a kid, i fell asleep in my backyard on a day like today. there's a storage shed in my backyard but before it was stuffed full of yardwork tools and pesticides, it was a clubhouse for my sister. my father and grandfather built it when my grandparents came to stay with us when i was ten years old. it was actually pretty cool. it had a front door that was "locked" from the inside by a string tied to a nail. it had two windows that were hinged at the top and were held open by metal wires looped around nails on the outside.

the really nice touch to the thing was that my grandparents brought a hammock from the philippines and hung it up inside the clubhouse. i went out there one afternoon and opened the door and windows to let in the nice breeze. i lay down in the hammock for the first time and i remember the ropes digging into my back. i always imagined a hammock to be a really comfortable thing but it wasn't. not at first anyway. i kept laying in it, staring up at the ceiling, feeling the cool breeze and the warm sun. i let my eyes close and shortly fell asleep. when i woke up, the sun had almost set.

i tried to sleep in that hammock another time but i never could. there was something nice about that afternoon that i could never find again. a few years went by and my sister and i outgrew it so it became a storage shed.

i once bought a hammock for a friend as a gift. we never set it up though. i'm not sure what happened to it. i was kinda looking forward to falling asleep in a hammock again but i didn't get the chance. that afternoon in my backyard was the first and only time.