welcome home

I can picture a rustic cabin, its once dark wood bleached by the sun. The small square structure with faded cedar siding sits at the edge of a black volcanic cliff, overlooking a windswept, white sand beach. Gray clouds scurry across the sky while rays of sunlight sneak through to brighten the water.

A wisp of a girl about the age of six, with sun-browned legs and arms, stands next to the cabin, watching nearly translucent walls of blue-green water rising and falling. Her fine blond hair is gathered in a high ponytail; the damp tip twirled to a narrow point. The movement and colours of the waves keep her spellbound. From her time in Hawaii, she’s already learned that once a wave climbs as high as it can go, it will start to fall, first with the farthest edge curling over and then the rest of the wave following. Finally, the wave will steal a kiss from the quiet pool of water underneath.

By the time the wave wets the beach, only a thin veil of water will remain, hemmed by frothy white bubbles. As suddenly as they appear, the bubbles vanish, and the wave will begin easing its way toward the horizon.

This less crowded part of Hawaii, on the Island of Oahu’s Windward Coast, is frequently stormy. From here, it’s a short drive to the North Shore, the site of even more spectacular waves and renowned surfing beaches, like Ehukai, home of the famous Banzai Pipeline. On both the island’s sunny Leeward side near Waikiki and here, where dark clouds scuttle across the sky, I, then a young girl, learned to surf, using my body as a board.

My parents and two other couples have rented this remote beach cabin and the ones on either side for a week-long vacation. Though I can’t see them, I know the adults are inside, playing pinochle and canasta and drinking beer and Seven and Sevens. I also know that while we’re here, I’ll ride the waves from morning until close to dark. Sometimes, I’ll catch the wave perfectly and ride it all the way to shore. Other times, I’ll wait too long to duck, and the wave comes crashing down. That’s when I get furiously tossed around until the wave spits me out and smacks me against the shore.

Between the waves breaking, saltwater keeps me afloat, helped by my circling legs and arms. I have no idea that I won’t be spending the rest of my life riding the waves on this idyllic coast. 

But less than three years from this moment, my mother will announce that my Air Force dad has gotten orders. I’ll learn that my family has to move miles from Hawaii to the Atlantic Coast. 

Barely a week will pass before I’m helping my mother wrap and pack dishes and all my father’s crazy knickknacks, including the bare-breasted hula dancer whose legs open and close to shatter open walnuts. Once we’re done, moving men will tote the cardboard cartons we’ve packed, along with tall wardrobe boxes containing our clothes and furniture, including the red Naugahyde and bamboo bar, the rattan Queen’s chair with its huge fan-shaped back, and the low Japanese tables, out of our duplex to a waiting van. Once the rooms are empty and my mother has vacuumed the carpet and mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors, we’ll leave our small Hawaiian home for the last time. 

We’ll board an aircraft carrier-sized ship, the S.S. Matsonia, docked in Honolulu Harbor. After a raucous going-away party, with people shoved in my parents’ stateroom and crowding the hallway outside, I’ll stand on the deck and watch my parents’ friends in their red, yellow, and green Aloha-wear traipse down to the dock. 

The boat’s horn will let out a loud, deep moan. My mother will announce that the time has come.

Standing at the railing, I’ll slip the string of purple and white orchids and pale yellow plumeria over my head and cradle it in my palm. Then I’ll pitch the lei as hard as I can over the railing into Honolulu Harbor. 

Legend has it that if one throws their lei to sea, and it makes its way back to shore, they will one day return to Hawaii. As the boat inches away from the dock, I’ll try to keep my lei in sight. 

But the boat will turn, and I’ll no longer be facing the shore. By the time I swivel around, my lei will be gone.

~

 As the plane makes its gradual descent, I peer through the window. Ribbons of colour run through the ocean, from cobalt blue to a pale glassy green. Above the white-sand beach, rugged emerald cliffs form an imposing wall. Thirty-five years have sped by since I sailed out of Honolulu Harbor on the S.S. Matsonia after three idyllic years living on Oahu. I haven’t been back to Hawaii since. 

“Aloha. Welcome to Kahului, Maui,” drifts out from the loudspeaker. 

I slip into line and follow other passengers to the door. After stepping down the metal staircase, I pause, basking in the delightfully warm air. The tropical breeze licking my neck feels strangely familiar.

I try taking in my surroundings as I hurry through the terminal behind my friend Katie. Unlike airports on the mainland, this one in Kahului, Maui, has low ceilings and is open on three sides. Earth-toned wooden planters, bursting with red, yellow, and orange tropical flowers—of hibiscus, birds of paradise, and ginger—sit underneath the open windows.

Seeing those colourful flowers, an unrecognizable emotion rises in my gut. The breeze drifting through the building also has me choked up. 

We claim our bags, arrange for a rental car, and head out on the highway. Katie is talking, but I tune her out, caught up in the new but somehow familiar sensations and sights. Fields crowded with chartreuse sugarcane line the road, bordered by striking strips of red dirt. The long, graceful leaves dance in the breeze.

After arriving at Katie’s parents’ condo, where we will spend the next week, I walk to the sliding glass door and step onto the lanai. I see that I missed the sunset. Only enough light remains to glimpse the white tips of waves rolling onto shore.

I take a deep breath and slowly let it out, happy to finally be able to relax. I take another deep breath, but this time notice a sweet, strong scent.

“What’s that sweet smell?” I ask Katie.

“That’s plumeria,” she says, pointing to a plant in the corner.

I walk to where she pointed, lean over a yellow-white flower, and take a whiff.

“It’s beautiful,” I say, lightly fingering the petals.

Inhaling the sweet aroma again, I realize the scent is locked somewhere in my memory.

“I remember this,” I tell Katie. “From when I was a child.”

The next morning when I open my eyes, sunlight is brightening the living room. Last night, I left the curtains open to see the ocean when I woke up. I slept in the living room, on the pullout couch. Katie’s in the bedroom down the hall.

After peeing and brushing my teeth, I walk out to the lanai. As soon as I step out, I’m greeted by that sweet, familiar fragrance. Waves roll onto the shore, feet from a perfectly tended lawn. Everything looks like the paradise I imagined. I should be happy, but I’m not. 

I drop down to one of the white plastic lounge chairs, close my eyes, and begin focusing on my breath. In the past year and a half since starting therapy, I have been stopping to tune in like this as a way of breaking through my depression. 

Scooting to the edge of the chair, I set my feet flat on the concrete lanai, unclench my fists, and rest my hands, palms up, on my thighs. Then I take a deep breath and feel the breath flow past my throat, through my chest and belly, and into my thighs. By the time the breath reaches my feet, I’ve started to cry.

I soon figure out why the scent of the plumeria seems so familiar. As I quietly weep, I unravel the story in my mind exactly as I would do with my therapist, Janice. Living on Oahu, I used to string plumeria into leis before performing with my hula troupe. Now, other memories of my life in Hawaii start bubbling up, which I haven’t thought about for decades. 

But more than remembering, until this moment, I haven’t ever grieved the loss of what was left behind when my family and I sailed away from Oahu.

I imagine my therapist asking what feels so sad. It doesn’t take long to come up with a response. I was happy then. 

A few minutes later, Katie joins me on the lanai. Her eyelids are swollen, and her face pale. Without a word, she drops into the lounge chair next to me and sighs.

“I’m sick,” she announces, her voice low and raspy. “I think I might be coming down with the flu.”

I rush to wipe the tears from my cheeks and the corners of my eyes. Great. I’m in Hawaii for the first time in thirty-five years, and the only person I know here has the flu.

“I’m sorry you’re sick,” I say instead.

“You might be on your own for a couple of days,” she warns.

We sit in silence until Katie gets up and announces she’s heading back to bed. 

I stay on the lanai, nursing my disappointment and kicking myself for having used my savings to come. When my stomach starts to growl, I head inside.

The only way to see anything in Maui is by car. Katie rented one, but without her driving me around, I’m stuck. At forty-three, even after lessons and practice drives at home in San Francisco, I’m too scared to drive without someone in the passenger seat acting as my instructor. I don’t admit this to most people, including Katie, who’s not a super-close friend and lives in a different city from me.

So, instead of telling the truth, after she offered me the car, I said, “I don’t want to go without you. I hate trying to find my way around a new place alone.”

I toast an English muffin, butter it, and slowly chew while I linger in front of the sliding glass door, considering what to do. When I finish eating, I quickly change from my sleep tee-shirt into a sleeveless white top and gray cotton knit shorts. If I don’t get out soon, I’ll feel even gloomier. 

As hard as I’ve worked this past year and a half to heal the depression, with weekly therapy sessions and on my own, I still struggle, especially in the face of disappointment. Step by small step, I have been learning to feel—sadness and anger, in particular—rather than pushing those feelings down and dropping into depression. But sometimes, I just wish I could take a vacation from it all.

—

The wind is churning the water when I step onto the beach. Katie warned me that this stretch was too dangerous for swimming. Without the courage to drive to a calmer beach, I’m left with the pool as my only option.

While I’m watching the waves, ominous clouds roll in, turning the sky gray. It looks like rain might start any second, but I’m determined to take a walk in hopes that it might cheer me up. 

I start walking. When I stop paying attention to my feet, I stub my big toe against a shelf of black lava. As I look down, a wave washes over the surface, then backs off. Even under those gray clouds, a slender point of light caresses the lava and makes it shine.

I stare at the lava, stuck in a time past. 

The shiny black lava reminds me of an instrument I played when I danced the hula. For certain hulas, I wove two smooth, palm-sized black lava stones between the index, second, and third fingers of my hands. Hips swaying and bare feet moving from side to side, I clicked the stones together like castanets.

The memory leaves me with a mix of excitement at having discovered something and sorrow for what has been lost. Looking around at the waves, with the palms dipping and swaying and gray-brown coconut husks scattering across the sand, I think, Patty, you have finally come back home.

We had already made three or four moves by the time my family landed on Oahu. Since I was young enough to believe my whole life existed in each moment I was experiencing then, the places we’d lived before Hawaii barely left the faintest memories.

Once I left home for college, I kept moving, as I had done with my family nearly every year growing up. I tried on every place as if they were blouses on a sale rack. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a place that felt like home.

Something did fit, though, like a favorite pair of loose jeans. That was the beach. So, the notion that I’d come back home to Hawaii wasn’t all that strange.

~

For the rest of the day, I feel as if I’ve opened a long-locked trunk full of memories. I can see the little bungalow where we first lived, the red hibiscus, brown wood roses, a Koa tree with curved black pods in front, and a banana tree with wide shiny leaves and the tiniest curled fruit in the back. 

I smell the freshness of sudden showers and notice the sun’s still out. Then I remember how we would roll up the canvas screens we dropped over the school bus windows the second the rain stopped. Outfits I wore while performing the hula reappear in my mind, including a floor-length lavender satin dress I had on when I danced on King Kamehameha Day on the Island of Niihau. I imagine I’m able to feel the smoothness of that satin against my palm.

In the afternoon, I head to the pool that overlooks the beach, dragging along a fat paperback, though I barely get through a few paragraphs. Like my walk on the beach, the pool stirs up memories. 

In the pool, I do something I haven’t done since I was a child. I lower myself into the water with my right toe pointed toward the sky. I used to call this move my Esther Williams imitation. 

I learned to swim in the officers’ pool at Hickam Air Force Base, across the street from our duplex at 4A Julian. To the left of the pool was an outdoor theater with a large white screen and seats on the lawn. Some nights, my sister Carol and I sat on the curb in front of our house and watched the movie, though we couldn’t hear the sound.

Beyond the theater was a bar housed in a small grass-roofed bungalow, a “little grass shack,” like in the “Hukilau Song.” The bar was called the Wahine Kapu, or as we translated it, Women Keep Out.

Lying on a lounge chair by the condo pool, slathered in coconut-scented sunscreen, I close my eyes and picture my mother, who was my first swimming teacher, in a strapless one-piece bathing suit covered with big red and yellow flowers. The water comes to her waist, but it feels deep to me. Over and over again, she tosses me away from her and shouts for me to paddle back.

Water swims up my nose and stings my eyes. Eventually, I learned to blow bubbles out and kick my legs and pump my arms. Before long, my mother will have to drag me out of the pool. By then, I will have learned to do a one-and-a-half somersault off the high dive.

The hot sun, and the laps up and back in the small condo pool, relax me. Happiness, I think. For some reason, I blocked out those years in Hawaii. Letting them in now, I understand. I was happy in Hawaii. 

~

A week after arriving, I board a Hawaiian Airlines plane in Honolulu, bound for San Francisco. Katie is staying another week before heading back to Seattle. We slowly taxi down the runway, and I peer out the window, waiting for my favorite part when we’ll speed up in preparation for takeoff.

Before that happens, I notice a line of navy-blue planes, and I realize we’re passing the Hickam Air Force Base airfield. I think about my father and how he used to look in his olive-green flight jacket and pressed khaki uniform slacks in the days when we lived here. A wave of sadness washes over me as I recall saying goodbye to him on the flight line before he climbed aboard the plane for one of his all-too-frequent trips to Japan.

The plane climbs, giving me that picture-postcard view of the coast, the sparkling blue water and dark Diamondhead. No one has slipped a lei over my head, but I can pretend.

Honolulu Harbor lies far below. Aloha, I whisper, keeping my face to the window so the man in the aisle seat doesn’t catch me crying.

In my mind, I lift the orchid and plumeria lei over my head and bring it to my face for one last sweet whiff. Then I toss the string of delicate purple and yellow flowers into the water.

I feel certain my lei has already made its way to shore.