Hawaii

It started like this: alarm, shower, confirmation from the husband of a positive covid test oh no! Then the ensuing scramble to find two more tests, one for myself and one for LBS, NEGATIVE YAY.

OK then, a mother daughter trip it is.

I call for a car and stick to our spring break plan and away we go!

So. I now sit here in Maui at a dark wood dining table in the little cottage that we bid for in the high school auction last year…before the horrific fires which had us thinking we’d cancel - but Maui advice I read mentioned that visitors are welcome and needed for the health of the local economy, so we kept to the cottage plan as much as we could anyhow with the covid problems. Its a rustic tropical single story cabin with a lanaii and windows with louvered dark wood crank open shutters. Outside are thick bushes of gardenia and hibiscus teeming with chattering birds and lizards skittering about. Its glorious. The lanai though, I am super into the lanai. I can see the flat line of the Mighty Pacific out the glass slatted windows as I take mental notes on the riot of birds apparently competing in a sound off contest. My vote for champion goes to the rooster, wild and confident. A real standout in this avian choral performance. I see a few cats lolling on the sunwarmed sidewalks, indifferent to both the birds and to us until any approach is attempted and then grey tabbies shuffle under the hibiscus bushes or behind the banana trees. And oh! The trees here...spilling luxurious fuschia blooms all over the electric greenest grass. The plumeria are daintily airbrush painted with irregular from flower to flower sprays of pink or yellow, defiant of the typical rules of mainland flowers. They compensate for this though by growing so uniformly on their trees that they look like a machine placed them there.

Its all too good to be true even!

The first night brought a little rain shower and a rainbow over the cabin at dusk, beautiful! The next morning when we woke up, Lili mentioned that she named the three inch cockroach under her bed Reginald. I was inspired to name the one that I found under my bed the next night too, and settled on Roberta. Reg & Rob were dead though, so ok. Thats life in the tropical jungle, baby. By night three, we were ninjalike with the ants crawling all over every counter and if a crumb of anything was left it was not left alone by these ants for long. There was a river of ants flowing steadily from the sink, the wall, from every crevice. Ants don’t bother me so much, live cucarochas bother me so much more and R&R were both deceased so ok we could deal with this.

So yes, too good to be true did turn out to be somewhat not all the way true, but ok! We can deal with this. We drove across the island to our reservation for lunch at Mamas Fish House, which was magical. Truly the ideal vintage visiting Hawaii experience: a warm wood interior that managed to be both cozy and breezy and airy at the same time. We sat next to a window that opened to tall thin palm trees above patches of  soft green grass with benches scattered about that birds would land on to search for a stray crumb. Beyond this is a small cove where sea turtles beach themselves for a nap and we saw three of them. Just idyllic!
After the drive home back to the cabin, we were jolted out of our idyll by the site of an unfamiliar to me insect. I mean Ive seen them in pictures but never yet in person. A scorpion! A writhing in the throes of death scorpion right there in our lanaii right in front of our door.

Later that night Lili mentioned hearing a rustling under her bed and that something was biting her and causing a rash. So. I did some searching and discovered that we were able to book a place in Wailea: right on the beach and on points costing nothing, so yay! Booked it for our final two nights. It’s closer to the airport too, better all around. That same night I could not sleep. The late night rustlings both outside and inside had me thinking that we should head out the next day, cutting things one day shorter still yet. So, I booked one night for the following night at Paia Inn, getting us closer to Wailea. I needed some rest! Though the cabin and its old sugar plantation grounds are lovely, the incredible amount of insects inside (and I grew up in the American south and am not bug squeamish except when it comes to dangerous ones like the scorpion and disease spready ones like the roach) broke the magic spell, sadly.

We got up in the morning, pulled our Mamas Fish leftovers from the fridge, checked the microwave for crawlers: all clear! So heated up our feast and we ate it at the sweet dining table before any ant could get there first. After this, we packed up and away we went to Paia.

The first thing I noticed about Paia was that it was about 10 degrees cooler than Ka’ana’pali which was nice. But the nicest things were that the tiny room with one bed and a foldout couch had an air conditioner, a sweet little daybed just outside the glass French doors on the porch, and an open air restaurant under a giant ancient tree with knobbly branches twisting up to the night sky. A magical white painted fence lined bohemian walkway took us straight to the beach, ahhhh! It felt so right to be there and I slept so well that I woke up at 5.00am to take that walkway straight down to the other ancient tree that was rooted next to the pacific, she was alive with birds chattering in the dark. When the sun rose they abruptly halted to a hush so quiet that the waves just took over their shift of sound.

I took a daybreak beach walk and came across a half lobster all spiny Davy Jones Locker looking. I left it there, it felt too much a part of the sea to move. I did find some bits of coral that I took back to the porch where the neighbor cat Sashimi lay curled up on the daybed. What a great day this morning unfolded into. No regrets.