Maui Postcard

In my mind, the three LLBean roller bags by the door are trunks with brass hasps and hinges ....or leather bound suitcases plastered with vintage luggage labels from vanished hotels and defunct airlines. I'm waiting for the knock on the door that will signal the beginning of the end of our Maui sojourn and a return to the logjam that is modern travel. No blast from a steamship's horn, no tripping down the gangway, just the endless stop and go of the TSA's dog and pony followed by the yoga positions of seats 28B and A.

BUT..... Before that there is Maui. Warm and moist, with a pervasive wind ranging from breeze to blast on the lose your hat scale. Any shady spot at any beach park on route 30 is crammed with vintage minivans, faded pickups fitted with surfboard racks, and untended fishing poles stuck deep into the sand. Maui waters are a playground; paddle boards and kayaks, snorkelers and surfers, sailers...and para-sailers. The ocean teems. Any postcard from Maui begins with a sunset and a beach: we tourists move to the sands as the shadows lengthen, stretching out selfie sticks, choosing an iconic palm tree for a silhouette, or perhaps a passing catamaran, moving toward a mooring before darkness falls. No sunset goes unrecorded! We even witness the apex of all cliches, the sunset beachside proposal. With a party of 50 eating lobster behind them, the happy couple may have been in a world of their own...but it was hardly a private moment....

Aloha, Maui, blazoned across postcards in fiery fonts: aloha and mahalo are courtesies bookending every conversation. The public face of Maui greets visitors graciously, but wander off the well beaten path and every drive is gated and every yard sports a 'no trespassing' sign. As a denizen of the rural routes and well acquainted with the stranger stranded where he should never have ventured, I understand. But it is difficult not to feel like we should climb back into our rental and head back to the main drag with its Snorkel Bob's and surf shops.

And the country roads of Maui are legendary for good reason. Consider the destinations: the switchbacks climbing five hundred feet at a time up the broad shield of Haleakala, the cars pulling around laboring bicyclists doing penance...or making a pilgrimage, take your pick, up the 10,000 foot climb to the summit. The landscape is other worldly: red and black cinder cones, cratered sands and boulders pocked with evidence of explosive force. The clouds form below your feet; the trip up wavers between bright sunshine and violet skies on one side of the mountain...and running the wiper switch and pulling your windbreaker close to escape the chilling wind and rain. At eight thousand feet, we pull off on the verge to watch two hang gliders prepare to launch. One stands on the brink, in the "set"position, waiting for the clouds to part and present a window of visibility. He gets a running start...fast, fast! he yells, and soon I am zooming my lens to find him riding currents I cannot see. When we reach the sunny slopes below, he is still high, high above us and we wonder how long he will glide and how far away he will land. The caravans of bikes zip down; one rider careens around a curve, hands held high over his head like he's riding a roller coaster at Worlds of Fun, not hugging the pavement on a cloud strewn cliff. Showboat....

Or wander the western highway north of the manicured lawns of resorts like the Ritz Carlton on Kapalua Bay and the precipitous fairways of championship golf courses like The Plantation. The wind is a wild thing, a poltergeist, knocking balls off the tees, sending drives back like boomerangs, and making the greens act like a fun house mirror. When I can forget my golf game, I am entranced by a landscape that takes turns pretending to be California.....or is it Italy?

Beyond the resorts, the road empties...fewer cars, no stores or gas stations, few houses, no restaurants. The waves foam white against cliffs of lava; landward, the vertical slopes overhang the road; every curve bears a warning for 'Falling Rock'. Gullies are a tangle of shrubbery, and the hills are punctuated with the twenty foot flowering stalks of what appears to be yucca on steroids. We have been dropped into a landscape of prehistory where I expect to confront giant tortoises around the next curve and pterodactyls swooping down to a primeval sea.

Certainly there are no restaurants. We are hungry and beginning to entertain the invitations of the hand lettered signs promising homemade banana bread and organic smoothies (well, maybe not desperate enough for the smoothies...) when one more right angle turn and POOF! The road evaporates...nothing but a golf cart sized track rutted into the hillside. Down in the valley, I can see a guy in a Kawasaki headed our way...hunger pangs vanish and we back and fill and back and fill to make a 180 and avoid a collision. This is Maui...believe it when the sign tells you maintenance ends.

In Kula, we enjoy lobster mac 'n cheese and Hubert's lemonade for lunch at the Bistro. Every restaurant offers local fish...ono, ahi, monchong. The non-GMO crowd is stridently obvious in bold letters and spray painted signs. Pasture raised eggs from free range tiny chickens are $8.99 a dozen in a grocery selling exotic bouquets of protea with a parking lot visited by vintage Dodge diesels that would feel at home in Westboro.

Next door is the Worcester Glassworks. The glassblower is finishing up his lunch, says his folks are at a show in New York, and he's been doing some trimming on the tropical shrubbery in the yard. The art glass evokes island life...seashells, spiny tumblers, sandy bottomed juice glasses, fish in all the hues of the rainbow, spun, drawn, twisted as if seen under the ripples of the sea. 

Maui is all color from the lavender jacaranda to the golden hibiscus to the popsicle hues of the tropical drinks. The glass artist tells me about the nearby winery: 'The wines not very good, but the grounds are beautiful!' The same can be said for the fruity drinks: Mai Tai, Lime in the Coconut, Lava Flow, Pina Colada, Coconut Grove. Not every one is good, but you feel obliged to taste them because they're so pretty!

Obviously, visitors to Maui bring their visions with them. There are more red Mustangs and red Camaros on the road than one sees on I-29. And the tops are down, even on an afternoon evenly divided between muted sunshine and pouring rain. I suppose those red convertibles are all standing in for the Ferrari in Magnum PI. Visitors dream of slashing the top off a coconut and drinking milk with a straw. Reality is the sign on the dumpster at Halfway to Hana, a snack shop...well, halfway to Hana: "Do not dump whole coconuts in here or on this property ". Guess coconuts don't taste as good as frozen drinks with umbrellas in them....

I am as prone to romance the island as anyone riding in a convertible. But I bring my essence of Maui home in concentrated form: a tiny scrimshaw tooth and a glass fish the hues of coffee and turquoise. Glass is born of fire and heat, a reminder of the volcanic origins of Maui's mountains and coast. The scrimshaw is a tooth mounted on wood bearing a tall ship, sails full of wind, and a honu, the Hawaiian sea turtle, swimming up to the surface. The tall ship is history, an emblem of all those who made Maui the melting pot it is.....and the honu is an symbol of Maui's legendary origins and good luck. I saw two turtles while hiking off the coast....the scrimshaw will always remind me of that walk.

 Luau or Lahaina, volcano sunrise or beach sunset, sugar cane fields or free range chicks: you will find your own Maui in your memories and souvenirs.

Cuppa Joe

"Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.".........Casablanca, 1942

Coffee changed my life.

Without the 10 cent bottomless pot of coffee and the all night hours at the Interstate Pancake House out on Business Loop 70, there might not have been the "beautiful friendship" that evolved into romance, a wedding, and now, nearly forty years of coffee in the morning, coffee on the road, coffee by firelight, coffee on the front porch....well, you get the picture.

The coffee at the Interstate Pancake House had two things going for it: it was hot and it was cheap.  The mugs were truck stop solid with a permanent caffeine ring in the bottom; the coffee was an odd combination of tasteless and bitter, so much so that we poured enough of the soybean gruel they served up for creamer to fill the cup to the brim.

Dating Blake made me a coffee drinker...after a fashion.  As a broke college student,  I bought the Safeway version of instant coffee and boiled water in the kettle. Taster's Choice was a splurge.  Starbucks may have been brewing for half a decade in Seattle, but the coffee at the Union at MU still tasted of styrofoam and the metal urns in which it boiled from 7 a.m. til closing time.

I'm pretty certain we received a Mr. Coffee brewer as a wedding present: Mr. Coffee had been around since 1974.  But the pot must not have been real durable; by the time we were living in the little house in the bottom, I had a real "old school" drip style tin coffeepot sitting on the burner in the morning, gurgling away until we finished the pot or the smell of burnt coffee drove me out of the kitchen.  As a means of coffee prep, it would never pass muster with the connoisseurs whose beverage must be prepared and served at a precise temperature.  The pot lacked the comforting and fragrant bubble and pop of a percolator, a sound and scent indelibly linked in my memory to church kitchens.  But...we had graduated to three pound cans of Folger's at that point, which made the brew smell like real coffee and not something brown reconstituted from space age freeze dried crystals.  We were mainstream; we were solid citizens, bacon and eggs for breakfast and a steaming cup of "the best part of waking up" with the Wall Street Journal on the side.

 "Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.” ― David Lynch

So imagine my dismay, years later, when I purchased a blue can of Maxwell House coffee in  Nashville, ("good to the last drop..") in an attempt to serve the local grounds to some writers exploring the many facets of that great city, only to have my pot of coffee greeted with disdain by the East Coast opinion makers and consumers of the group.  What an uneducated naif, a tasteless provincial, a benighted primitive from the dark center of the continent!  After we got over the embarrassment, we succumbed to social pressure the next visit to a Barnes and Noble and waited in line for our first Starbucks coffee.

Anonymous Quote: “A cup of gourmet coffee shared with a friend is happiness tasted and time well spent.”

And thus ensued any number of pleasant hours in a short but golden era of bookstore browsing:  a hardcover for edification, some paperbacks for pleasure, a mocha or cappuccino to sweeten the scalding blackness of the brew and warm the drive home from the city.  Alas!  The bookstores are gone, replaced by browsing for titles at all hours day and night via Amazon and the featherlight medium of coursing photons.  While hard copies are rare, hot beverages have flourished, and we former consumers of Casey's go cups now search for coffee shops, not truck stops, as we travel.

Yes, after our penny pinching origins, Blake and I have joined the coffee aristocracy: a Bunn for full pots on Sunday mornings, a Keurig for late night cups of caf for Blake, and decaf or herb tea for me, a bright red grinder to create the strong brews we are partial to, and to entertain the grandkids while they "help" make a cuppa for their grandpa.  Finally, a SECOND Cardinal Red Keurig at the greenhouse for Blake's birthday: he's not the easiest person to buy for, but this gift is a winner.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845) said, “If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee; it is the intelligent beverage.”

It was Sir James Mackintosh who said that, “The powers of a man’s mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.”

Black for breakfast.... or after supper.  In a combine .....or in a china cup. From contemplation to conversation, relaxation to reflection, coffee has been a thread weaving together the fabric of our life.

Flash Rosenberg wrote that, “I believe humans get a lot done, not because we’re smart, but because we have thumbs so we can make coffee.

Flowers for Mom

I was always nervous when Grandma Hurst made her annual visit to the greenhouse; she loved flowers and I never wanted to steer her wrong with the flowers we had available. We grew miniature roses back then...and Grandma loved roses. They didn't really flourish in the corner under the evergreens, but she picked them out anyway and never seemed to care if they turned out to be annuals, not perennials. Grandma and Grandpa loved taking their family out, but the Mother's Day she decided the thirteen of us should celebrate up at the Tall Corn in Shenandoah turned out to be a one time only event. First the little kids ate all the bread; then they ate all the crackers; Grandma huffed as her great grandchildren went from restless to worse.

After Mothers Day church, all the mothers attending church at Christ Lutheran in Orland Park received a little fuzzy blue ageratum as they departed. Even today, the fresh but pungent scent of the plant speaks to my memory as the flower of Mother's Day, just as the scent of marigolds is connected to summer and Vacation Bible School. Some years we bring geraniums, some years wave petunias, or maybe begonias, but ladies at First Baptist of Tarkio leave with flowers Mother's Day Sunday too.

Even though we were working on Mother's Day while Ben was young, he still honored his mom with a pretty corsage Sunday morning. While other moms and grandmas pinned their flowers on their frocks, this mom wore her incongruous posy on her t-shirt until it wilted on Mother's Day afternoon. I still have a dried corsage of little pale mauve roses on the windowsill of my kitchen.

It will not come as a shock that Mother’s Day gifts were inclined to follow a gardening theme. Trees, shrubs, pots or whatever the garden center was long on that spring came home in the back of the trailer and was ceremoniously unloaded to appropriate oohs and aaahs.

Except for the year Blake made an evening delivery to one of our country customers and backed the trailer over some statuary they had for sale. That year what I got for Mother’s Day was a concrete cherub. He was designed to hold a bird bath over his head, but the birdbath shattered on impact. Without the birdbath, he looked like an underage waiter at a bar, jauntily weaving his way through the crowd with a tray of beers.

Monday begins another frantic week of flower deliveries as the days before Mother's Day intersect with the planting season for city parks and fundraisers for school groups from Kansas City to Norfolk. For this mother, it is a time to count blessings as my Fitbit counts steps. Loading the trucks this past weekend was a family affair in the chill and damp and mud that has marked the end of April. Josh showed off his ability to count; Lizzie and Abbie showed off balancing flowers high overhead and the boys were promised that carrying flats would increase arm strength for baseball. We slipped and slid, laughed, and teased, and promised pop to those who stuck it out all afternoon. And everyone did! With energy a plenty to jump on their bikes and ride to check on their pigs.

The moms and dads this day were the kids of yesterday, who pitched in to help with varying degrees of enthusiasm or stoicism, but stayed to work until the work was done. Mother's Day is a time to reflect on those who made the mold, who set the example, who steered us in the right direction while we were young and oblivious, who we appreciate more as we look back.

P.S. It is an especially memorable week for this family because Lizzie and Gabe and Abbie all turn nine. Mother's Day may be for flowers, but these kids will need ice cream!

  

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