A Fabulous Peck on the Cheek, Next Week a Kick in the Pants

 This was when the house was arriving-

I got such a kick out of an event that happened this week, well, two of them. I’m of the sort who, when I see or taste something stupendous, I have to run out and tell someone. You know, when we taste something really superb, we offer a bite to our spouse or friend, and say, “Oh, this is so good, here, try this.” The same works, though, if we taste something awful, “Augh, this is terrible, here taste this.”

Okay, first off, this is about moving our tiny house:

One reason I thought this driver was so superb was that I used to drive a pickup truck pulling a horse trailer, and whenever I needed to back it up, I broke out in a sweat. So, when the moving fellow said he would back his truck into our gravel driveway that runs alongside our regular drive and back to where the tiny house is parked under an RV- high roof, I said, “No way you can back into there.”

He said he could do it, and he did. He had changed his mind about using the Mule—a remote-controlled small tractor, and decided to use the truck instead.

Amazing. With a truck a half a block long, the cab reaching into the branches of our Magnolia tree alongside the driveway, carrying the Mule in a space behind the cab, and pulling a trailer longer than our house, he made it back to within inches of the tiny house.

The creative-thinking driver, with his magic trailer and remote-control device, lowered the back of the trailer to the ground, much like the bucket on a Bobcat, except it was 12 feet wide. He scooched the trailer loading ramp under the 4 x 4’s that supported the house, lifted, scooted, lifted, scooted until suddenly wheels appeared from beneath the trailer like landing gear descending from beneath an airplane, and settled in under the house.  With his remote control, the operator moved the entire house sideways to within an inch of the fence on one side and an inch to a tree limb on the other. He even cut a limb with his chainsaw and kept adjusting the house to line it up perfectly with the narrow driveway.  

A tight fit--top roof be gone.

When the house was completely off the ground and onto that trailer, he got in the truck and drove it out.

We still have the tiny house.

It’s parked in our graveled driveway.

We can show it for sale there and have it moved again when we get a a buyer. That tiny house is no longer trapped under that RV high overhead. We had to remove its roof to make space to lift the house, because dragging it out was dangerous.  

Want to buy a tiny house?

 

Don’t put your mother-in-law in it, unless she is very agile, for the bed, a full, brand new mattress is on rollers and slides easily under the raised kitchen floor. That arrangement is enormously better than the cramped loft, the only thing that was in the bare-boards house when we bought it. (Daughter Dear thought a tiny house would be a contribution to inexpensive housing. And it was her art project.)

She got rid of that loft right away—too claustrophobic. Now the building is insulated, beautifully plastered, and has a large tiled shower and a complete bathroom.

One of the contractors told us we could rent it for about $800 a month. Rent it out on Airbnb it,or live in it. Daughter Dear doesn’t have time to work on it anymore, and rather than have a carpenter come in and finish it, she figured that the owners could have a discount to purchase it if they complete it. That way they can put their own stamp on it.)

All the component parts are included except for a kitchen counter, and some elbow grease —you choose the counter. Being a tile aficionado, my daughter tiled the entire wall, in light brick above the kitchen cabinets. The bamboo flooring is provided, half in the bathroom is complete. There is slate tile for the kitchen. The sink, refrigerator, stove, faucets, lights, room heater, hot water heater, and a new mattress are provided.  The wiring was professionally installed. Water can be provided from a faucet. Toilet and drains need to be plumbed beneath the house. With an extension cord, a garden hose, and a composting toilet, it could be self- sufficient, provided you could dispose of gray water. You know, like in that back 40.

Door tile detail. 

 And now, the second magnificent find this week: It’s a love story as told to me a long time ago by a member of my family.

 

One thing about being a writer is that you find pages you wrote years ago and forgot about them, so when you find them, it’s a surprise. I found this old story, tucked away in the garage. It was the inside pages to a Newsletter I wrote ages ago.

My family member who is no longer with us, said it was about her sister.

When the sister was 28 years old and had just left a romantic relationship, she decided she knew there was one thing she wanted. That was a child.

So, when an old boyfriend rolled into town, she took advantage of the situation, struck up another rendezvous, became pregnant, and was prepared to be a single mother.

The baby was born at 28 weeks of gestation, had problems for a time, but survived, grew, and was healthy.

Sister rented an apartment (Where? I don’t know, this sounds like New York). The apartment was on the third floor, a walk-up. The owners, a Jewish couple, lived on the first floor, the second was rented, and the sister had the third.

The owners agreed to care for the baby while sister worked, and they decided they had another task. That was finding a husband for sister.

When the second-floor tenant left, leaving the apartment available, the owners held out on renting it until they had the perfect tenant. That left the apartment vacant for quite some time. The sister thought it just didn’t rent.

But then it did. To a nice single man.

One day, after her sister picked up her baby from the owners on the first floor, she walked from the second to the third. The man saw her upstairs, fumbling with her keys as she tried to get into her apartment while holding the baby. She had just had her wisdom tooth extracted and was swollen up like a cantaloupe. On top of that, she had Bell’s Palsy, which causes one side of the face to droop. (Some people recover from this, some don’t.)

The man came up behind her and said, “You look awful. Let me hold the baby for you so you can get some rest.”

They fell in love and got married.

The Jewish couple paid for the wedding.

 

 

The Day the Earth Exploded into Color

 

Joe's Orchid

      "Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams."
—Haruki Murakami

"Earth, 114 million years ago, one morning just after sunrise: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opens up to receive the rays of the sun."—Eckhart Tolle

Plants had already populated the earth. Ferns reproduce without flowers by producing "spores" on the underside of their leaves. Conifers, aka "evergreens," produce offspring from cones, and the Banyan tree "walks" by way of a limb touching the ground and sprouting, thus making a new tree. That tree does the same, and so on.

Plants that flower, however, were late bloomers.

The first flower probably did not last for long. And probably flowers were a rare and isolated phenomenon for a long time.

One day, however, a critical threshold was reached, and suddenly the world exploded into color.

Think of this, my dear friends; we could be like the flowers reaching that threshold. The monkeys did it through their 100-Monkey Phenomenon. One day, a single little lady monkey washed her sweet potato in a stream. It wasn't long until all the monkeys on the island were washing their sweet potatoes, and they had not seen her do it.

There could be, for human beings, a sudden, explosive awakening where we pull our noses out of the mud and look to the glories that could be ours. We could see that we are glorious, powerful beings connected to a divine presence. I want to be alive to see it, experience it, and be a part of it.

A handwritten sign about two feet long and eight inches high, with the letters' Alohilani spelled out, was on the right side of Hawaiian highway in route to our house. It was our marker to turn left onto the road. Many times, we would have missed our exit had it not been for that sign. The road to our house was virtually invisible from the highway, disappearing into cane grass as tall as the car.

But, we wondered, what if the heck is Alohilani? 

We had purchased ten beautiful acres at the end of the road—the end meaning as far as you could drive. The road once transported pineapples from Pahoa to Hilo. During our time there, it was impassable beyond our property.

Along our two miles of lumpy, bumpy lava-based road leading to our house, there was a gate and a park-like setting sitting behind it, barely visible from the road. what we saw the the largest water-tank we had seen to date. We must have lived there for two months before we found out what it was. It was Alohilani, an orchid farm.

As we were preparing to leave the Island about a year later, I called Alohilani. Joe, the owner, invited us to visit his beautiful spread.

The portion we saw after driving through his gate and away from the road was acres of green around his house, manicured into a park-like setting, populated by three dogs, three horses, a multitude of sheep, and pigs who played with the dogs and slept clean and sleek under the palms.

"Isn't this what a farm is about," asked Joe, "having animals?"

My kind of guy.

Joe told us that when he first moved onto this property, the land was raw, untamed, and wild. He bulldozed, planted, and built the highest tree house I have ever seen. It must have been 100 feet in the air, and not in a tree but on poles. He built a packing building and erected rows of shade-cloth-covered structures, and filled them with orchids.

Growing orchids is labor-intensive, we found out.

 

 

 
The day my daughter, grandson, and I arrived, Joe was breaking bottles.

The bottles were about a foot long, square on the long sides, and about 2 inches wide.

Holding a bottle over a trash can, Joe gently tapped the end of each bottle with a hammer, broke the glass, and then poured the tiny orchid plants into a bucket of water. Two young women then placed a single sprout into a one-inch peat-pot.

The bottles were filled with a gel substrate that nourished little green sprouts. Joe said the suppliers did not randomly throw in the seeds; they carefully placed each plant in rows on the gel using long tweezers. In two years, those tiny plants would become exquisite flowering orchids.

Joe, now a widower, told us that the climate on the Island was perfect for orchids. The plants grown there are much hardier and healthier than those raised in greenhouses or imported from the Orient.

We told him we were leaving the Island and moving back to the mainland. Here we were, neighbors, and we had only just met when we were about to leave. I looked over at the pigs sleeping contentedly under the palm trees. They were of the wild variety, black, sleek, exquisitely clean sleeping pigs, contentedly grunting pigs on clean grass, in the shade of palms, paying us no mind. They were free to come and go at will, and those sleeping under the palms, Joe told us, had been born on the farm. The wild pigs had found a haven, even if—we discovered later—once in a while one became Joe's food.

As I was preparing to leave, Joe said, "You eat pork, don't you?" He opened a refrigerator packed to the brim with packages of meat, took out an entire pork shoulder, and thrust it into my arms. A parting gift. How wonderful to have met him.

I was investigating the possibility of importing orchids when we got back to the mainland. At the time, Joe was willing to provide me with the opportunity to import orchids. However, when we returned to the mainland, I found orchids in shops and grocery stores less expensive than I could provide. Joe found a way, for he was constantly exporting them. As he said, his plants had been grown on native soil and were thus healthier--perhaps specific companies, florists, and others appreciated that.

As I said, we were preparing to leave the Island. First, we had decided that while we made great tourists, we made lousy Polynesians. Island living was not for us. Second, my husband had developed a heart condition, and the doctor asked me, "You know about the Big Island, don't you?"

"In what regard?" I asked.

"If your husband needs further treatment, he will have to go to Honolulu."

Holy moley, I thought, I'm not commuting to Honolulu.

We couldn't get off that Island fast enough.

Incidentally, we saw a gold orchid. Really! It was as gold as gold, and a living plant. This orchid was not at Joe's but at another tourist display farm. (Perhaps that was the reason for Joe's tiny sign, only to show delivery trucks where to turn--and us--not for tourists' directions.) The golden orchid had a price tag of $25,000.

However, the golden orchid was not for sale. I wondered at the time whether this was like the old ploy of listing a thousand-dollar bottle of wine on a menu so the others seemed like a bargain.

Joe was the real deal.

Alohilani in Hawaiian means "Full of compassion."

 

 

Alohilani, Carved out of the jungle when I say we lived in the jungle, we were about one-quarter mile from Joe's place, and this shows the jungle.

Read about living for one year off the grid in the jungle of Hawaiii where the Coqui frogs (that sound like birds) sang us to sleep at night. in The Frog's Song by Joyce Davis