Listening to:  Laura Marling’s You know, Master Hunter, Devil’s Resting Place,  Rambling Man, and Devil’s Spoke 

Currently reading: Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

I am currently residing on a very different island.

The first island I wrote about was cold and rainy.  One that demanded a person stay indoors, wrap themselves in a blanket, and drink hot coffee.  An island that willfully accepted hibernation and crispness, rain jackets, and umbrellas.

This island is the opposite.  This island yearns for the people that inhabit her to be outside.  And if propriety’s laws were lax, completely nude.  Running among the sand like babes getting browned in a gentle sun.

My husband is a list maker. The first day he scanned a book on Hawaii and we have a full agenda of activities.

We have visited volcanoes and beaches, little tourist towns, tropical libraries with all the windows open letting in the sweet, breezy air.  Tennis balls attached to table legs and chairs to foster the illusion of silence.

The island sun has embraced my beautiful family as their own.  My love and my children’s skin has darkened to various levels of honey.  A light brown here, a dark mahogany there.  They run on the beach with sand in their clothes.  The sand pure and soft and clings to the skin but causes no abrasion.

And the flowers smell so sweet.  John buys me a lei and it smells deliciously of plumeria.  Intoxicating and seductive like the island. We attend a luau filled with indulgences like roasted pig and fire,  beautiful smooth women and tattooed fire eaters,  white toothed smiles and long hair, and coconut tops.  Drinks in abundance.  And the warm wind blows just warm enough.  Just loving enough.

I walk through the tourist traps filled with cheap knick knacks for the masses, none of it made in this tropical paradise.  Shirts and magnets.  I snatch a bottle of plumeria perfume and spray it to capture the scent of my lei.  It didn’t work, and resulted in a rather disastrous cloud of offensiveness which caused another tourist to look back at me angrily.  I understood.  I now reeked of backdoor brothel.

I laugh at the silliness of it.

Today we head out again to watch sea turtles.  My baby just walked out with a bag filled with snorkeling equipment.  Maui sends yet another invitation to journey into her depths.

At the moment, I must refrain because I am still attracting sharks (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) but once that is done dancing into her waters is where I will go.

Mahalo.