Hannah and Her Sisters

Hannah is my oldest and dearest friend. We've known one another since our first day of Montessori kindergarten in 1976. She snatched my coveted violet blue crayola while I was in the midst of coloring my artistic interpretation of Pewpie, the tiny, bubble-breathing dragon. who lived in my belly button.. With her short boy haircut, Sears Tough Skin Denims, Red Chuck Taylor's and Spiderman t-shirt, Hannah appeared destined to be the class bully. The truth is she was a total girly girl being raised by a widowed construction executive and the youngest of four children—and the only girl. I punched Hannah hard in the shoulder and snatched the crayola back—that's how you earned respect in a house full of boys. Hannah shrugged, grabbed the blue violet crayola from the box and continued drawing flowers and butterflies. We've been kindred spirits ever since. Three months younger than me and two years older than Jenna, my baby sis, Hannah filled the role of middle sister and honorary daughter in my family.

Unlike her brothers and "honorary" sisters, Hannah stayed in Cincinnati. She majored in architecture at UC and is now a principal partner in her father's construction company. She kicks ass on the job all while wearing a construction helmet and manages to look graceful and feminine doing it. Ironically, her two oldest brothers pursued careers traditionally dominated by women as nurses—darn good ones, too. Brother #3 is a computer programmer. Her father is proud of all his children, but he nearly burst with pride when Hannah joined his firm.

Hannah isn't taking my Mom's cancer well. She cries every time my Mom is out of ear and eyeshot. Agreeably, Mom looks sick with no hair, pale nearly translucent skin and her always-slight figure made slighter by the cancer diet. Last night, Hannah cooked dinner for Mom and I while we played with Amelie and Amelia, her two-year twin girls. Smack dab in the middle of dinner, Hannah has a breakdown and starts telling my Mom how much she means to her and how she is the mother she never had. True to form, Mom folded Hannah up in her tiny little arms and rocked her until the tears subsided. The twins kept asking "Grammy, why Mommy cry? Grammy, why Mommy cry?" to which she answered, "Mommy just needed a hug, baby girls."

We all piled around Hannah and hugged her for a few minutes. The twins in unison said, "We hug Mommy good, Grammy. Squuuuuuueeeeezeeeeee."

Hannah's mother died from breast cancer when she was three. That makes watching my Mom go through her struggle with cancer that much harder. She thinks I'm a tower of strength because I don't cry. Truth is, I'm terrified of losing my Mom. I just choose to do my crying in private. Mom needs to see my strength and resilience right now, not my tears.

Taranga, the Polynesian Sea-God(dess)

Taranga is my best friend in all of French Polynesian. She is the feminine namesake of Tarangoa, the Polynesian sea-god, who separated the sky from the earth. He is the son of the earth-goddess Papa, who had so much water in her body that it swelled one day and burst forth, becoming the ocean. Taranga's mother loves to tell the story of her birth in the middle of the rainy season. She explains that each contraction coincided with violent lightning and loud claps of thunder and with each push to free Taranga from her womb the winds blew harder shaking walls and rattling the windows of the midwife's tiny office. Moments after Taranga was born and she let out her first cry, the storm settled, the clouds cleared, the sun came out and a rainbow appeared. How much of this is true and how much of it is embellished with a mother's love is up for discussion, but I choose to believe that the whole story is fact.

To know Taranga is to experience first hand the human equivalent of the eye of the storm. She has more energy, strength and presence than any person I've ever met. All of this wrapped up in a tiny body standing five feet three in flipfops with long black hair shiny as an oil slick and honey-brown eyes that look right through you. Taranga is the first in her family to go to college and attended the Université de la Polynésie Française where she majored in education. For almost 20 years, she taught at a primary school in Papeete. Taranga never liked Papeete and describes living there as "a tropical version of New York City with all the crowds and congestions but none of the culture." At the age of 42, she found her true calling and now runs the tiny atoll school. Taranga is the person who hired** me to teach English and Art to the 102 students at her school. The best job I have ever had.

**The term "hired" is used loosely due to the fact that work visa's are not granted in the islands by the French government. Unemployment is a huge problem--though in my case, Taranga has been looking for someone to teach Art and English for three years. It was a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

More later...

Taste of the Tropics

Mom and I visited Krohn Conservatory on Thursday. It was a rainy, gloomy day. Mom was feeling a bit defeated by the fatigue-inducing chemo. I was having tropical climate withdrawal. The tropical room at the conseratory did the trick for both of us-lots of thick palms and succulents. The conservatory houses a large variety of ferns and unusual cycads. Bromeliad and begonia surrounds a koi pond. There's even a waterfall and cave. The tropical room maintains a high humidity and feels like the atoll in the cool season which happens to be right now. My favorites plants are the chocolate tree, pomengranite, vanilla vine and the dwarf banana. It even smelled like home. The trip did us both good.

What Will This Blog Be When It Grows Up?

It will be a month tomorrow since I dipped my barefeet in the lovely lagoon near my house on stilts. I'm adjusting fairly well. Seven of my 34 years have been lived in the South Pacific. All the rest were here in Cincinnati living on a hill overlooking the Ohio River or a hippy enclave in Northern California during the college years. And I don't know what direction I want this journal to take. Would you find it more interesting to read a thoughtful (even humorous) account about how different mainland life is to island life? Or, would you prefer to read about my Mother's struggle with cancer and whiny, bratty entries about how I'm such a martyr/saint for giving up my love and my "happy-go-lucky" life in paradise?

That last question was of the rhetorical and more of a scolding to myself. I'd give up living on the atoll forever it meant my mother would be well. Jack would move back to the states with me without question. It was my desire that he stay behind while I'm here and keep things going with the diving business and our life in general. I am so lucky to have this time with my Mom. Seeing my family once or twice a year for the past seven years leaves a lot of space for catching up. Folks, if I sound like I'm whining, let me know. Smack me up side the head a few times with the mouse cursor even.

An Island to Oneself

"I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the earth for the taking; but though I came to know most of the islands, for the life of me I sometimes wonder what it was in my blood that had brought me to live among them." - Tom Neale

One of my favorite novellas and part of what inspired Jack and I to move to French Polynesia (besides the trip we took there after college) is Tom Neale's story "An Island to Oneself" about his life living on a uninhabited atoll in the Cook Islands. It's a great read and the complete version is available on line. Enjoy!

An Island to Onself

My Pictures of You

Big, bad Gus gazing out to sea. You don't see sights like this in Ohio. Bald is beautiful.

Coconut Les

Jack of All Tradewinds

The Tale of the Hairless Psychic and the Mysterious Big Drip

The last post on the old blog reads "to be continued". I know it isn't cool to up and leave people hanging and, if a former reader finds me here, I'm sorry. I really will continue things, but right now life's about caring for my mother and having my feet firmly planted on dry land. It's not about the little beach house on stilts, Jack's sun-browned skin, trips to the big island for food and supplies and the miserably slow and expensive dial-up access that made "live blogging from the beach" possible.

At the moment, I'm sitting next to my mom while an evil, red chemical drips slowly into her veins. The nurse said it may cause an acute burning sensation at the point of first contact. Mom doesn't complain, but I can tell it hurts her. It's a nasty chemical called Amsacrine, but it kills the cancer by blocking an enzyme called topoisomerase II. If this enzyme is blocked then the cell's DNA gets tangled up and the cell cannot split into two new cancer cells. If I saw that stuff oozing toward me, I'd run, too.

The oncologist's office has WiFi. The nurses lends laptops to chemo patients with the energy and desire to compute or surf. Mom's playing an online game of Texas Hold 'Em against two other patients and some guy in Arkansas with the screen name Thumper1961. She curses under her breath when she loses.

She's starting to lose her hair. This is her third chemo session. She did the first one solo. I caught the earliest flight I could out of the islands as soon as I got the news. I still feel guilty for not being here from day one. I should have trusted my dreams. I gave Mom my "lucky" pink beach hat to protect her naked head from the sun. It's always served me well. Mom likes the way it smell, like the atoll. She says she can close her eyes and smell the salt air and hear the pounding of the surf. Mom has an appointment with the hairdresser to get her head shaved next week. She doesn't want a wig. Can't say I blame her. One of her friends gave her a shirt that says "Bald is beautiful." She's looking foward to wearing it.

She said something sad and funny yesterday, "I don't know how good of a psychic I'll be without hair on at least some part of my body. How will I know I'm getting one of those feelings if there's no hair to stands up on the back of my neck? Can you get goosebumps without hair?"

"I don't know, Mom."

Jack e-mailed me late last night:

Coconut Les [our neutered male cat] misses you ferociously. He cries and mewsm looking all over the house trying to find you. Sissy Fuss is indifferent. So long as she is fed, she seems happy. I know how Coco feels. I miss you ferociously, too.

I miss you all.

The Gift

It's funny-hmmm, not funny-haha, how my status in cyberspace and meatspace has flipflopped. Two weeks ago I was living in a remote, tropical climate far removed from civilization--at least civilization as we know it in the suburbs and urban centers of the Midwest. Two weeks ago, I had a popular weblog and knew more people online than inhabitated the tiny "atoll" I called home. It's not really an atoll, merely one of many small islands several miles of the coast of the "big island". Now, I'm back in Cincinnati surrounded by so many people who know me that I can't walk out to get the mail without a neighbor striking up a conversation, aksing me how my mother is doing.

I miss Jack like a bird would miss its wings. I know that he needed to stay put. He would have suffocated on land. He's part fish, part pelican, part man. We are better being apart for now. I need to do this by myself and he needs to maintain the way of life we worked so hard to establish. I knew that my homecoming was only a matter of time when I started having the dreams about taking care of my mother. The dreams gave me time to prepare and to make my peace with leaving the place and the person I love most in the whole world. Jack will still be there taking intrepid tourists on dive adventures. Our little house on stilts will still be there unless a hurricane hits and even then Jack and our neighbors would rebuild it. The ocean, the sand, the palms and the sun will all be there when I return. It's just a matter of when not if.

For now, my mother is my focus--caring for her as she goes through the chemo and the radiation. She's fighting for her life though she "senses" everything will be okay in six months to a year. I want to believe her, but my dreams are different than hers. My dreams don't have a happy ending, they just show release. I wish I could turn the dreaming off, but whenever I am around my mother it kicks in to high gear. She magnifies my dreams like a giant lens. Everything is bigger, brighter, close up and real. She's always affected me this way. Since I was very small and able to understand that my dreams were more then just dreams, something that falls somewhere between premonition and vision.

My mother's had the gift since she was four and she's made her living telling people the future. She is honest and fair with her gift. She doesn't squander her second sight like a cheap carnival fortuneteller. She uses it to help people. Her pay has always been by donation. She never sets a price or asks for a cent. Some people can't pay her that's why they seek her, for hope that things will get better. She's always been okay with how that worked. She only asks that they call her and let he know when things go better and they usually do--the people and things. Mom always said that as long as she can provide for her family, she can afford not to charge.

My grandmother had the gift and so did her mother. I come from a long line of "psychics". I hate that term, but it works in a world where people want labels. I believe we all have second sight, some of us just don't know it, some of us can't do the interpretation. I've chosen to shut that part of myself down as much as possible.

Living on the atoll with Jack helped. People, not places give me the dreams. Now here, in a medium-sized city in the midwest with my mother and so many people around me, the dreams are back full tilt and I'm worried. There are some of us who don't want to know the future. There are some like me, who just want to live in the here and now.

Always Start at the Beginning

The old blog is tired. The new one feels great like sand between my toes and salt water in my hair. Many happy returns. Life's a beach, right? More to come. Don't say I didn't warn you.