Page 27 of Big Island Neighbors
Before becoming a mother, she had naively believed that having one child (or even the three or four she had originallyhoped for) would be a breeze compared to managing a whole classroom full of six year olds.
She’d been wrong.
Mothering her one child day and night tried her patience in ways that her years of teaching never had.
It had been easy enough with Adam around. He would work a twenty-four-hour shift and then come home for two or three days. Kai’s intensity had caught her off guard at every stage of development, but with Adam by her side it had all been manageable.
Then Adam died, and everything fell apart. She found herself shouting at her six year old, which only made his behavior ten times worse. Or she would hide behind closed doors and leave him glued to a screen all day long, which did the same.
They had both been slowly regaining their equilibrium since moving to Hawai’i, but it was a long road. Neither one of them was doing half so well as they were a year ago… and in her darker moments, she doubted that they ever would.
How could life without Adam ever be anything less than… well, less than?
Most days she was just going through the motions, trying to find joy in the little things but rarely feeling anything more than the faintest glimmers of happiness or hope.
She considered it an impressive achievement just to feel mostly okay – mediocre was a huge step up from those days that she couldn’t bring herself to crawl out of bed.
But a life half lived wasn’t what Adam would have wanted for either of them.
Kai deserved more.
And so did she.
The getting there, well… she would have to take that one step at a time.
These days, the project that brought her the most peace and happiness was her garden. She retreated there now, hooking a harvest basket over her arm and walking the short distance from the kitchen to the vegetable garden.
After multiple false starts that included a stampede of wild pigs and a war of attrition against the snails and slugs, her garden was thriving. Her big sister had carefully selected dozens of varieties of heirloom seeds that thrived in the tropics. Between that and the starts that Mahina had gifted her, Emma had every herb and vegetable she needed right there in the yard.
She went down the rows at a leisurely pace, plucking enough watermelon radishes and long beans to feed them for days.
A few would go into her lunch, and the majority of the veggies would be turned into a dish for the weekly soup kitchen at the community center. The radishes were a gorgeous shade of pink on the inside, and garlic honey elevated the simple vegetables into haute cuisine.
She topped off her garden haul with a tall pile of collard greens and carried it all back up to the house.
“Mrs. Kealoha?” The voice was so soft that she stopped and looked around, unsure of whether she had heard anything at all.
Then a second voice shouted, “Hey auntie!”
She looked over to see Piper run off, a flash of red against the lush green landscape. Cody stood at the fence, peering over with a shy smile.
“What’s up?” Emma asked.
“I was wondering if I could come over and cut your cactus grass.”
She blinked at him. That grass was the bane of her existence, so vigorous that she could almost see it growing, overtaking the orchard and fences no matter how hard she worked to keep it cut back. It was a horrible plant, covered in nearly invisible spines that worked their way under the skin and burned like fiberglass.
“The cows love it,” he explained. “They’ve eaten all of ours.”
“You are welcome to all of the grass you want to cut and carry. You don’t even have to ask, just come on over whenever.”
“Thank you. I’ll start tomorrow morning, if that’s okay. Before it gets hot.”
“Sounds good.”
She continued up to the house and set about washing the produce she’d gathered.
There were tiny pieces of lava rock in the soil that sometimes lodged themselves in the root veggies, and she had learned to scrub them carefully to avoid any tooth-scraping unpleasantness.
