dispatch from the sickbay

There is the occasional rain on Poipu Beach. It started Friday night around 8, just as we stepped out the door and onto the dirt path to the "adult" jacuzzi. The wind made the sprinkles seem more robust than they really were, and Phil hesitated, but I led him bravely on. The "adult" jacuzzi is a twenty person capacity lotus-shaped attraction with a fountain in its center and a peek-a-boo view of the sea. It was dark under the cloudy night, though, and twenty minutes into the soak, it was only us and Trevor--a funny kid from Vancouver, BC--when the rain began in earnest. But it wasn't cold, and the whole episode seemed so joie de vivre that we stayed out a half hour more.

I awoke with a scratchy throat and allover achy feeling. Yep, a touch of the flu. Let's not blame it all on the rain-in-the-jacuzzi recklessness, though. School is out; I am for a brief flash beholden to nothing and no one. Of course my body is going to break down a little.

No pity, please. There isn't a better place and time on earth to feel like crud. The rowdy wind departed with the rain on Saturday morning and left nothing but thinly stretched cloud wisps across the sunny blue. I am warm and well-appointed by Diamond Resorts International ^TM. There are no essays to grade, no people to see, no errands to run in competition with the rest of the anxious traffic. The fridge is overflowing with guava juice and sweet tea. I take aspirin and lay on a lounge chair, surrounded by chartreuse foliage, rock-a-byed by the birdies and the five thousand miles of Pacific Ocean between me and Australia careening into the low lava walls. I shall recover well.

With the wind dispersed we now have a clear view of the whales awaiting their girlfriends. The humpbacks are without a doubt the most dazzling of the creatures in our midst, but not the only ones. We seem to have a pet cat, who looks like YouTube's existential Henri, camping in our patio bushes. We have frogs and Cattle Egrets, crabs and albatross, and Phil wants me to say he has seen a lot of Brown Boobies. Yesterday a pheasant flew from one side of the road to the other right in front of our windshield--"flew" being a generous description of a barely-airborne upright bird blurrily swinging his wings like saloon doors. There will likely soon be a dedicated creatures post, but for now, behold our first houseguest:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my brief ventures off the lounge chair, we dipped into Koloa Town to visit Howard Yamamoto's 1925 Monkey Pod, whose winding arms are so vast and so entwined with the eaves of Sueoka's grocery and the Crazy Shirts shop, a picture can't capture it. We also gave ourselves a tour of the rustic Koloa cemetery. This is the sort of place so eerily lovely it defies adequate written description. I kind of felt I was in The Brady Bunch "Tiki Curse" episode, but then a sun shaft would drench a plot full of silk roses.

 

 

 

We'd have stayed longer but for the one bane of all great old cemeteries--the insatiable mosquitoes. Driving out along the back end, Phil remarked about something the road-side chickens were pecking at, and then stopped the car, saying "What the hell is that?" It was a large armadillo-shaped carcass, mostly rib cage from where I sat, which he got out to inspect. It was in a trough against a wall of yellow bamboo. Within five paces the smell sent him back to the car, reporting that "it might be a dog or a pig." Whatever it might have once been, it was now an emblem of the macabre yet mundane incongruence that peppers this (and probably most every other) tropical island.

This morning we went to the welcome breakfast by the pool where the concierge spends an hour in front of a big map, and local outfitters stop by to plug every tourist excursion on Kauai and raffle off two-for-one prizes. There were eight families present and seven door prizes, so my odds were good. I didn't want the two-for-one helicopter tour, which would still cost me $300; I wanted the South Pacific dinner theater, for which the representative hooked the crowd by singing a few lines of "Nothin' Like a Dame," "Bali Hai," and other favorites. Guess what I won!

 

For the record, credit for nearly all the photojournalism goes to my husband, who happily passes the time while I nap off my little flu by editing his daily hundreds of snaps. I have snapped one or two back up images as well, though.

 

 The picture of bliss.