Warm air, jet fuel, cigarette smoke and plumerias.

I didn’t post on Monday. I was busy drinking maitais by the pool in Hawaii. Okay, well, in truth, I was busy chasing the kiddos around the pool, which was even more fun, and I did sneak in a maitai or two.

I was ready for a little vacation. We went to a resort just outside Honolulu with my husband’s mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law, cousin, and my mom. Here are a few photos (which you have already seen if you follow my Instagram feed).

It was perfect, but I didn’t blog about it while we were there because I always feel like blogging about being on vacation is like inviting people to rob you.

But now that we’re back I can say – it was lovely.

More than that, it got the juices of my deep deep memory flowing, and as a good little writer nerd,  I’m proud to say, I did my fifteen minutes of writing every day and then some. I wrote almost exclusively about memories of other places, of the times in my life that I have lived on other, much less resort-like, islands. The smell of that thick warm air, jet fuel, cigarette smoke and plumerias kept transporting me, even as I loaded car seats in and out of rentals, to times I almost never think of anymore.

For two summers, when I was thirteen and then again when I was fourteen, my sister and I went to live with my dad on a small island in the south pacific called Kwajalein (here’s a map of roughly where our home was – if it had an address I don’t remember it). My dad, a retired Marine captain, was managing the airport there at the time. In my memory it is such a magical place. We went SCUBA diving every day. There were no cars on the island except for official military vehicles. The place was overrun with kids – military brats whose parents worked all day. We had such a blast. The air was hot and sticky, and our double wide had a plumeria tree growing over the top of it, and there was no air conditioning so the smell of plumeria wafted through the windows all day. I think I did keep a journal back then, but even if I could find it, it would probably just be full of gushing about Brad, the lifegaurd at the pool. Brad.

Then there were the four months I lived on the much drier, even even less populated, South Caicos, at the School for Field Studies. I studied fishery management and went SCUBA diving every day. I went on a date with a very large, local man named Ganger. He took me to the only restaurant in town – Aunt May’s – the carrots were delicious. My classmates and I took our tests under water with pencils on slates. We drank a lot of rum. We stopped whatever we were doing at sunset and gathered to watch the spectacular show.

These are the memories that came up for me in Hawaii. It’s amazing how scents take us back. I wonder if I’ll ever actually go back to those places. They are so remote, it’s hard to imagine. The whole thing has me feeling pretty nostalgic. I suppose there are stories in these memories, but for now they are just notes in my journal, to be mined at some future date.