That neighborhood girl was always there. The small hanging hammock was draped from a gnarled crabapple tree, with mossy rope like the kind tied to boats at a lake's port. A bubble of a hammock, with the girl tucked inside, curled up with a book and a stitched red blanket, like a yolk sleeping in an egg shell.
That neighborhood girl was always there. She smiled when her cats pounced in and out of the woodpile next to her. She looked wistfully at the bare crabapple branches that weaved above her. She laughed as her dog sniffed her bright orange socks peaking out from under the blanket. She pushed herself off of the trunk of the tree to make the hammock swing. She cried when her book was sad.
That neighborhood girl was always there. Every time I rode my bike past her house she'd wave. Every time my friend and her mom would walk by with rackets in hand from the tennis courts she'd call out, Good game? Every time a mother pushing a stroller went by she'd leap out of the hammock, finger holding her book's page, and pick up the glove the baby dropped behind them.
That neighborhood girl was always there; even if she was called in for lunch, even if the phone rang for her to answer, even if the cats needed to be fed, even if raindrops fell through the tree branches, even if the moon came to scold her. That neighborhood girl was always there; even if the book she was reading was done.
