A special time with Mom on Kaua'i begins...

Full circles await closing as we land on the island

 Don’t forget to hit the ❤️ to let me know you’re with us!

A few weeks before my flight to Kaua’i, Mom changed her mind and decided to join me on the North Shore to visit the Forest House nee Montgomery House, now restored.

We’d made this pilgrimage together in 2014, when I was writing Freckled. I didn’t think we’d ever return, but here I was, ten years later, picking Mom up at the airport when she arrived on a flight from Maui a few hours after mine arrived from San Francisco. 

After a joyful hug following a snafu finding each other in the airport (Mom doesn’t do cell phones) and the lengthy ordeal of picking up a rental car (Lihue Airport is chronically understaffed), we headed out. 

Mom had brought me a lei from our favorite local store on Maui, Native Intelligence, a trove of Hawaiiana art and flower craft. As I drove, I inhaled deeply. The blue jade flowers and tuberose emitted the most heady fragrance, and the loving gesture of the lei encircled me with glorious scent, each breath bringing me home. 

We stopped and bought health food to support Mom’s plant-based diet at a small store in Kapa’a; our favorite health food store, Ambrose’s, which I’d included in the novel Torch Ginger, was closed now. But I was pleased to see that overall, the little town hadn’t lost its fun, funky charm in the years I’d been gone.

Stocked up for the week and ready for adventure, I drove us out to the condo in Haena I’d booked. Every twist and turn of that narrow, two-lane road heading to the north side of the circular island brought us further down memory lane.