E is for... Ebb and Flow and East Oahu

Tonight, after a more than stressful week, I'm relaxing with a glass of wine, listening to Jack Johnson, and thinking about the ebb and flow of life and how I arrived in East Oahu, my new home.

  

About six years ago, my husband and I moved to Hawaii with nothing but our backpacks and a few thousand dollars, which may sound like a reasonable head start in some places, but in Hawaii that amount may get you a month's rent and a few groceries.    For four years, we had been living on an unrealistic high.  A lengthy Peace Corps service and six months of traveling had left us feeling as though there wasn't anything in the world that we couldn't conquer or accomplish.  Little did we know that we were in for a hefty dose of reality.  

Over the years, we eventually worked our way into an incredibly blessed life, but along the way, we made our home in some very interesting places. We started off in a tiny one bedroom where our neighbor threw a television set at his new wife for not coming home on time and drunk college kids nightly perused the streets. One morning when we woke to the sounds of our other neighbor's bowel movement, we decided that we needed to suck it up and move into a better neighborhood.


The place we found was even tinier than the first, but considering the peacefulness of the area and gorgeous ocean view, we were willing to make adjustments.  As life goes, we got better jobs and started to notice the deficiencies of our new home.  For starters, we lived in the same house as our landlady, which made things a bit too close for comfort.  Then, when her daughter, who we like to refer to as Godzilla, was home, all we could hear was stomping.  There is little doubt that she had a lead foot.  Yet, the kicker came when our landlady's 80 year old mother, who we both still to this day swear had a boob job, came over, after just visiting the country club,no doubt, to visit her daughter.  We just happened to be upstairs.  The conversation went as follows:

Landlady:  Mom, meet our tenants who live downstairs.

Mom:  Oh, darling, how lovely.  Oh, it reminds me of that show. 

Landlady:  What show? 

Mom:  Oh, you know, that one where the servants live downstairs.

Landlady:  Oh, Mom (blush,blush). I'm not sure what you're talking about.  

Not wanting to be recruited to wash up the nightly dishes and pass out H`orderves at dinner parties, we decided it was time to make some roots and find a place of our own.  

Early this year, we were able to find a home that is perfect for us.  It needs quite a bit of work, but the potential is all we see at this point.

And that is a storyteller's version of how we arrived in our new beautiful neighborhood in East Oahu.