We had always wanted to move to the islands. To start a family there, and live as sustainably as possible. Life on the American continent, especially its center, meant food that was shot across empty cornfields in hunks of metal, bouncing around in the back the whole time. Who knows what ground it came from, what was in the ground, what unnamed underpaid worker had harvested it. In Hawaii, it was warmer. Warm enough to grow everything our family would need to thrive through every season. Warm enough to grow avocados, pineapples, coconuts, papayas, bananas, the essential and delicious fruits native to the tropics that were foreign and insulated from the foreign temperatures every time we purchased them on the continent.
My first child, Elvis (after the rock star), was born in the United States, the continent, almost exactly two years before we left. It would have been nice to have all of the children born in Hawaii. It feels strange having a relic of the temporality of our choices permanently etched on to him in his birthplace: we can’t ever change where we’re born, and he doesn’t really have any connection to that place. But it was his birth and the understanding of what it meant to have children and grow outwards towards infinity that showed us the necessity of building something in Hawaii that could last.
We didn’t have the finances or the knowledge of the island to purchase a house when we first moved there. So we lived in an apartment, with no soil of our own. The complex was open air. Our apartment was on the second floor, and we took the concrete steps up every time. The railings were thin and metal, painted a glossy black many times. The railing continued along the corridor to our apartment. At the top of the stairs we turned right and continued walking along the railing to our apartment. On our left was the first floor atrium with a few palm trees that grew past us up to the third floor, and a few small tropical plants that clung to the mulch. Some days we would prop the front door open with a cement brick and let the air run through the front door to the balcony.
Our balcony was small, and overlooked the apartment parking lot. The apartment had the same glossy black paint over metal as the railings. We tried grew a few things out there, on the only space that was ours. Basil. Cilantro. A single tomato plant. The balcony got far more sun than we expected and the basil withered and the leaves turned yellow. I don’t remember exactly how we got rid of it or when exactly we realized it was over and wouldn’t grow anymore. Things grew better in the windowsill, in indirect light, but we had stopped growing things we could eat. There was only one bedroom in the apartment, so Elvis slept with me and my husband every night. We knew that this couldn’t last forever but we weren’t sure when the moment of change would come.
My husband worked as a tour guide, while I stayed home and took care of Elvis. I became pregnant with our second child, and and we began to more intensively look for a real house. We found one, but it was a bit small and a bit out of our budget. It had the second bedroom that we needed, but only a second bedroom, which would be problematic for our future plans. It had the yard, what we wanted and needed to set down our roots, but the yard was small, cut off by a fence only twenty feet from the house. But we bought it anyway. We were ready.
One of the first things that we did when we moved in was to plant an avocado tree, Sharwil variety. Sharwil avocados are creamier than Hass avocados, and can’t really be grown commercially, at least in climates that can’t grow avocados. Hass avocados are really the only avocados that can: their thick skin prevents the bruising in transportation that the other varieties would suffer from. But in Hawaii, on our own land, we could enjoy the Sharwils would come from our tree, in a few years, once it grew big. In the meantime, we bought Sharwils from the local farmer’s market, where people had who had already set down their roots harvested and sold the excess of fruit that those roots produced.
Our second son, Sandy (after the sand on the coast or maybe a baseball player), was born in this house, a few months after we moved into it. Home births allow for control of every aspect of what goes into a birth in the same way that homegrown food allows for complete control of what goes into the soil. I didn’t want to take painkillers during my birth, and it felt easier to do it the way I wanted at home. Elvis was in the room, our living room, when Sandy was born. He was too young to remember it though.
Avocados weren’t the only thing that we planted. Over the next four years, we planted sapote, papaya and mango trees, we had basil and arugula and hawaiian peppers, katuk, collard greens and tomatoes. The mango and papaya trees didn’t produce much fruit, but they would with time. I became pregnant with our third child.
As Elvis became older and entered into childhood social spheres and I developed a social sphere of people who had lived on the island for a while, we learned of a Hawaiian tradition to plant a coconut tree when your child is born. I’m not sure who gave it to us, if we learned it all at once or slowly realized what it was, but I thought it was very pretty as a way to symbolically and literally set up my children’s future. Two of my children were already born, but I planted two coconut trees for them anyway. It was ugly in the same way that Elvis’s continental birthplace was ugly: a reminder of the temporality of my exposure into Hawaiian culture and that I couldn’t just “be in it”. But lives are long and the ugliness of planting them was short.
Our third child, Scout (after the character in the book), was born in the house, the same room that her older brother Sandy was born. I planted a tree for her too. The house that we lived in only had two bedrooms, and her brothers were sharing one, so she slept with us like Elvis had. We knew that this couldn’t last forever, and that we couldn’t put three kids mixed gender in one room, but we weren’t actively looking for a way to resolve it.
But a few months later, a house with a yard over the ten times the size of ours went on the market. We weren’t looking for houses, but we kind of were, and our finances had grown stable enough to afford a bigger one. We thought about the difficulties of moving, but then realized why should we not? We were only forfeiting four years of our growth that we had spent at what was now our intermediate home: four years is short enough in the span of a lifetime.
When we moved to this house, our final house, we thought about transplanting the coconut trees. I ran a google search and the answers seemed vague and contradictory and not that relevant to what I was looking for. The gardening sites just didn’t answer my biggest question: what do I do about the roots that have already clawed their way into the soil? How do I carefully pull them out? Will they survive the one hour bumpy drive to our new home? Will the tree grow in a new place? And why wasn’t this the only thing that mattered to people who were looking this up? The coconut trees weren’t even that tall. They looked like bushes, with their long and large leaves fanning out of the small wooden trunk that would eventually grow big enough to produce coconuts. My oldest son was taller than them.
We didn’t move them. We thought about replanting them, but I didn’t want to. There were already coconut trees in the yard from the last owners too, who had planted their own roots for their own reasons and then left for their own reasons. It seemed wrong to plant more when these coconut trees had already grown to full size.
The old owners had left a lot of plants. There was a coffee tree: we don’t drink coffee. There was already an avocado tree in the yard too. We couldn’t figure out what variety it was: the avocado flesh was hard and not even really edible. So we bought another Sharwil and planted it. There was a papaya tree that had grown too tall to reach the papayas. We weren’t sure what to do about that and still aren’t.
The owners used to have a koi pond, next to the porch. They took the fish with them when they left. We filled in the empty koi pond with dirt, and used it as our gardening box for tomatoes and greens and herbs: the small-rooted plants. It looked very nice and was very close to the house: I could send Elvis and probably Sandy soon out there to get basil for me as I cooked so they could help.
Some of our friends, who’ve lived on the island for a while, say that with a plot of land like this, in ten years, we could be 90% sustainable. Elvis will be eighteen in ten years, but Scout will only be eleven. Living 90% off only the plants on our land, that have slowly grown up before our eyes and can continue to grow taller and taller every year after that, for our children and their children. Provided that they stay here, we have provided for them. We have set down the roots.
