Paradise

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” So begins Isak Dinesen’s epic 1937 memoir Out of Africa. I love this book, and the 1985 movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, although given the European colonial bent to the tale, it is probably not kosher to say that out loud. But it’s a story of place and finding one’s home, as much as it is certainly an example of white colonialism in an African culture. And admittedly, anything regarding “home” has my attention immediately.

Given my deep love of home, I have often said to Matt that the perfect trip lasts four days. Four days is long enough to enjoy a change of scenery, but not so long I start to get homesick and begin pining for my bed and piano and cats and garden. Four days is perfect.

We can’t get many places in four days, Matt always says in response to my limited travel timeline. He’s right, of course, and there are so many tempting places to visit. Which is exactly why last month, we ended up on a farm in Hawaii.

Actually, the real narrative begins with the Southwest Airline debacle over the holidays last winter. We had tickets to visit family in Kansas City and ended up driving the 12+ hours back to the Midwest instead of flying. Southwest refunded us our travel points and then we were the lucky recipients of the Mea Culpa points the airline gave everyone who was stranded or troubled thanks to the mess. In short, in January we realized we had like 5 million Southwest airline points. Enough to get to Hawaii. And back.

Hence the farm in Hawaii.

But before we could pack our swimsuits and big sun hats, we had to finish a semester of lessons and choir rehearsals and a season of concerts. There was that fun plumbing project. A studio recital and a summer’s worth of piano lessons to schedule. There were a number of former students in town stopping by for visits. After months of infections and several hospitalizations, my dad had prostate surgery. Our car had to be taken into the shop for new brakes and to get the air conditioner fixed.

Which made finally getting on a plane heading west all the more sweet.

We flew to the Big Island and consumed the first of many seafood meals. We checked into our tiny cottage on a farm outside of Hawi on the northern tip of the island and were greeted by four dogs, four cats, a full-sized horse and a miniature horse named Barack. As soon as we stepped on the big covered porch, time began to slow down magically, spooling out in a sort of leisurely Andante pace instead of our normal frenetic Prestissimo one. It was delicious.

Mornings found us on the porch drinking coffee and staring off at the ocean in the distance or walking into town and joining the locals at the coffeehouse. One day we hiked down to a black sand beach and another day we snorkeled outside of Kona. We took walks along endless shorelines and toured a tropical garden near Hilo. We ate fish tacos and read books. We watched our blood pressure drop 30 points in three days.

Then to Kauai, the Garden Island. There we had a condo in a resort community five minutes from Poipu Beach on the southern tip. Every night, sea turtles crawled out of the ocean to sleep on the sand. Those days saw more tacos, and more snorkeling, and more hours spent lounging on our patio watching the ubiquitous wild chickens and the colorful geckos scamper across the lawn. We kept our eyes peeled for mongooses, which we quickly realized were as mean as our roadrunners back home. I went on a guided garden tour. Matt visited coffee houses in all the nearby towns. Every morning and evening I’d walk the length of the beach and count the sea turtles. Four turtles…seven turtles….twelve turtles and one monk seal! My hair fell into crazy curls, styled by the humidity and salt. I never got the sand out of my sandals or my swimsuit. We existed in a surreal time zone, neither New Mexico time nor Hawaiian time, but something that hovered just off the western coast of California. We woke up with the sun, ate meals at odd hours, showered multiple times a day. For once, time didn’t hurl us through our waking hours, it crawled.

For the first time in my life, I overpacked for this holiday. Despite my reputation of packing for trips in nothing but, as one friend puts it, “a Ziplock,” I brought clothes I never took out of the suitcase. Even after looking at the forecasted weather, I could not be convinced that I would not need layers in the morning and at night. My desert wardrobe habits run deep; I couldn’t comprehend a climate where it was already 80 degrees with 80% humidity at 6am. I brought socks I never wore and thought it entirely reasonable I would need a nice sundress and shoes for dinners out. We ate dinners out, for sure, but never fancy ones, and never ones that didn’t involve us walking across a beach before or wading in the water afterwards. In one restaurant, I wore the black swimming suit I had been snorkeling in that afternoon with a black skirt and a flowered sarong thrown around my shoulders like a shawl. No one even blinked. Rummaging through my suitcase of clothes I would never unpack, I remembered Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift of the Sea. “One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding, how little on can get along with, not how much. Physical shedding to begin with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields. Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full. And what a relief it is!...One finds one is shedding not only clothes—but vanity.”

In a life where we spend our days not only chained to our schedules, but also trying to convince students and colleagues and choir members to get on board with our calendars, there is nothing more appealing than 10 days without an agenda. While I admire folks who plan their vacations carefully and make written itineraries of their hikes and tours and dinner reservations, we can’t do it. Instead, what we most need when we get away is empty space and unscheduled time. We need to wake up and say to the other, “Well, what do you want to do today?” and let several hours pass before the answer emerges. That is a holiday.

Of course, this also means we miss a lot. Or to look at it another way, we always have a lot of reasons to return. In this case, there are many hikes still to take, volcanoes to see, a lot more places to snorkel and explore. We visited not a single art gallery or boutique shop, unless you count Orchid Alley, a sweet little slice of floral heaven in Kapa’a on the eastern coast of Kauai. There are still kayak tours to go on and waterfalls to find. And so much more seafood to consume.

Who would we become if we lived here? This is a question I often ask myself when we travel, imagining the gardens I could have in the Cotswolds, or the chic hairstyle I would casually sport if we lived in Paris. I would take up kayaking on Lake Travis if we found ourselves residing in Austin and would certainly join a walking club if we lived in England’s Lake District. In Hawaii, I’d grow orchids (see above: Orchid Alley) and bougainvillea. I’d take my swims not in a chlorinated pool, but in the ocean. I’d wear linen pants and let my hair go wild. I’d breakfast on bowls of fruit and shredded coconut, and do yoga every morning on the beach. Maybe paradise isn’t found in a specific place, but rather in an authentic and honest way of living, true to where we find ourselves. After all, home is not merely a location, but the person we become within that space.

Back at home, we settle into summer à la New Mexico style. Travel, I discover once again, gives us not only rest, but also new eyes. And if we open ourselves to the possibility, it can change us in small, graceful ways. I think of that as I put shredded coconut in my yogurt and add a hibiscus plant to the garden and an anthurium to the bathroom. I return to my laps at the swimming pool, and dive into my summer teaching schedule. I fill hanging baskets with succulents and buy macadamia nuts at the store. I plant more herbs and put in three tomato plants and fill hummingbird feeders. In a climate that doesn’t see rain showers three times a day, I resume my regular summer watering practices. We grill fish for tacos, cut up a pineapple and eat dinner outside in the courtyard. As the sun sets, the temperature drops. I grab a sweater.

But for a few days, we had a farm in Hawaii. And that, friends, was everything.