My children were born in Punalu’u. We were all very young then. No need for a car or a phone, and least of all the intrusion of a television. Computers were not yet heard of. The elements sufficed. Rich soil produced fresh vegetables and campfires blazed every evening as we hosted the travelers from the beach park. Riding a horse on the beach was just for fun and to feel the wind in our faces. Local folks taught us how to fish and pick edible seaweed.

When we harvested our first cucumbers and cut into them, they oozed a thick gel and we were confused so we called the University of Hawaii Agricultural branch of the collage to ask if they were Ok. The department head chuckled and said, “I guess this is your first harvest from a garden in the rich soil of Windward Oahu? It’s simply fresh. Enjoy it.”

When we cooked over the campfire we played John Denver songs on our guitars and served homemade soups and breads. There was always plenty to go around no matter how many campers joined us. And we made friends for a lifetime.

An old lady raked the beach park every morning -- it was so pristine you didn’t want to step on it for the first few hours. When the rainy season came and rivers widened at the shore there would be plenty of kukui nuts washed down from the mountains. We would gather them, painstakingly clean them out with a dentist’s pick, and then polish them with their own oil until they shone like black rubies.

The land was overabundant with coconuts so we made coconut milk, coconut flour, coconut whipped cream, grated coconut, coconut candy -- when the nut was old and turned to a gray sugar, and coconut spoon meat -- when the nut was so young the meat was just a little firmer than Jell-O.

Our whole grain homemade breads were superior because we had all the time in the world to let them rise, punch them down, let them rise, bake them slowly and eat them hot with mounds of butter melted into each slice.

Our babies learned to count from opening seedpods and they learned to paint with natural little brushes that fell off the Lau Hala tree. Our closest neighbor was a lovely elder Hawaiian woman who sat under her banyan tree pounding the bark of the mulberry tree, making tapa cloth. And when horses galloped up the beach we often hitched a ride, not because we had anywhere to go, but because we wanted to hear his hooves in the shallow waters and feel the wind on our faces as we rode long the shore.

There were turtles and harmless schools of little fish inside the reef waters. Local folks taught us how to spear squid and cook it, how to pick the right seaweed to eat, which peeled cactus tasted just like green beans when sautéed in corn and sesame oil and just how green papaya should be to make a perfect green papaya salad.

Days became evenings and we slept at night with an incredible ease to the sound of ocean waves lapping on the shore and palm fronds playing a soft tickling rhythm above. And every morning, as the sun warmed pikake and plumeria growing in our gardens, the trade winds brought their sweet fragrance wafting through our little bungalow.

We were brown, healthy, young, and invincible.

But alas, the world came knocking on our door one day and we woke from the dream. We realized, like Wordsworth, that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…”. And we began a new journey -- not far from Punalu’u but enough of a distance that it became a memory. And now we stop from time to time and recall when our children were babies and life was a simple yet profound occurrence. And we know that “trailing clouds of glory we come…” and we give thanks, Remembering Punalu’u.