“Single hammocks and double hammocks, and hammocks with and without spreader bars.” “There are long hammocks and short hammocks,” I say. My wife doesn’t want to talk about hammocks over dinner, but for the time being I have no other topic. “Get up and help me measure what’s left of it,” I say. When I lean outside I see the middle one lying on the ground beneath the cleanly split hammock. I see the middle one lying on the ground beneath the cleanly split hammock, iced coffee in his hairĪs I switch back and forth between sites I hear a sharp rip, followed by a thud. There do not appear to be standard sizes, and a like-for-like doesn’t seem to exist. There are many websites dedicated to hammocks, but none of those offering replacement hammocks sell the kind of stand mine came with.

I walk to my office, sit down at my computer and type “replacement hammock” into the search bar. And there are only about five days of summer left. Outrageous, I think: this hammock is barely two years old. There is a two-inch split in the fabric at its lowest-hanging point. I climb out and discover the cause immediately: the threads of the hammock slowly giving way beneath me. When I return to my original position, I hear it again. When I look over the edge of the hammock, I hear it again. I wake to a dull but insistent noise, like someone plucking the strings of a muted guitar. Within minutes of finishing the coffee, I am asleep. That afternoon I return with a pillow, a coffee and some reading I need to do, although my plan doesn’t really include reading. After a morning of sunshine, I go out and touch the hammock: it’s dry. I spent most of August in my office shed watching the hammock drip in the rain, waiting for a break in the clouds that never came.įinally, a stretch of hot weather arrives. Over the course of this summer I got down to just one remaining son at home, but there was little in the way of hammock weather. “I’m at my job,” he would say, pointing to the Zoom meeting taking place on his phone.

A little life audio book