Island living is sensuous.
I can walk out my kitchen door and pick a papaya from this tree for breakfast, build a fire in the patio barbeque any night of the year, watch the sun slip away over the West Maui Mountains from my perch on the slopes of Haleakala Crater’s lowlands, stand in the cool evening trade breezes under a bonanza of starlight while waiting for the moon to roll over to the western sky. There are herbs and flowers and blue-ribbon limes and tangerines free for the picking, thanks to my gracious landlords. There is Kitty La Rue, an elegant blonde cat who watches carefully when I leave and welcomes me with a smile when I return. She spends her days overseeing the pasture where three adopted zoo goats and one elderly Shetland pony live out the rest of their lives in grazeful bliss.

There is a forest fifteen minutes up the mountain and an ocean expanse fifteen the other way. We have the world’s best coffee, home made breads, huge vine-ripened tomatoes, Maui wines, sushi, and chocolate éclairs just down the road at our local market. We have a weather report that sounds like this ninety-five percent of the time: “Mostly sunny. Some windward and mauka showers. Trades fifteen miles per hour. Highs in the mid seventies.”

I live at an elevation of about one thousand feet above sea level where the earth is dark and rich: herbs and root vegetables thrive in our gardens. There are pine trees and weeping willows and coconut palms and stands of bamboo. In the wide sky I watch flocks of birds gather and glide across the sky—like a synchronized moving puzzle at the end of the day -- as they head to their roost for the night.

When I have stared too long at my twenty-inch Mac Intelcore computer screen and it’s too hard to face anymore deadlines, I just hop in this good old ninety-two Ford Ranger and head to the forest or the ocean and every single time I do and every single day I breathe in the soft Hawaiian atmosphere, I’m reminded and renewed and grateful and filled, once again with too much wonder… and it has to be shared.

So please enjoy these colors, designs, words -- and thanks so much to all of my pals who made it possible with a “yes”!

Aloha Nui Loa,
Barbara