There’s one thing I did that Mr. Twain never got around to doing. I actually moved to Hawaii. Sure, it took 11 years of dreaming about it, thinking about it and talking about it, but eventually my husband Eric and I did move.
In a letter dated October 26, 1881, Twain wrote his friend Charles Warren Stoddard in Hawaii,
"If the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of Haleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom all thanks belong, for those privileges, and never house-keep any more…. What I have always longed for was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands overlooking the sea."
The house never burned. Twain never did move to Hawaii.
And it’s still true the “isles of the blest” are a place for rest and healing. They are still a place for eating poi and even for eating dirt, if you choose, and which explains why Twain’s idea of never keeping house anymore in Hawaii was way off. It’s the very things Twain and I love about Hawaii—the ever-present trade winds, the smell of the salt air, the open-air living—that makes it one heckuva place to keep a clean house. Trade winds carry dirt and salt—they also keep the mosquitoes on the fly—through our open windows and into our living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, even closets creating a sticky substance that sticks to everything and even rusts the paper clips and staples filed in my desk drawers. After a time, the pillows on the couch feel sticky—dog hairs swirling in the air attach like glue and a sprinkling of our iron-rich dirt stains a wash of red. Counters require daily cleaning and windows that stand in the face of the northeast trade winds, alas, do not defy a salty buildup. The need to clean never goes on vacation in Hawaii.
One other thing, Mr Twain, there are now cell-phone-toting and chatting visitors on the summit of your once-secluded Haleakala. I’m sure you’d agree—a travesty.
