And still more, later flowers for the bees, 
        Until they think warm days will never cease.
– John Keats

Dear September 2014,

I read somewhere there are six daughters and seven sons in the main myths of the Hawaiian Islands- but when you’re sleeping ten minutes from the mouth of the Halema’uma’u crater- there is only Pele that matters, and maybe Hi’iaka hidden in the night around her. I never found out for sure, I heard someone else say that I had it all wrong because there were forty sisters- though admittedly, this was when you counted the thirteen incarnations of one of them. And if you do begin to count those, I am not sure where you’d ever stop, as it seems the Hawaiian gods are not limited to one body- they can be themselves, human, a fern or a wild boar, coral, a gourd, a type of banana, or the rain in a season like September.

I slept in a small green tent and ate a cob of sweet white corn and ruddy potatoes balled in tin foil around a campfire. I remember laughter and paper plates, the first bite of ono, red wine, eggplant, a wedge of gouda, and hodgepodge of grilled vegetables. There was also someone else’s birthday cake one night followed by an unparalleled consumption of marshmallows. I remember strong coffee in the morning, writing postcards overlooking the crater, haphazardly taking pictures of arbitrary scenes and wondering if I would be able to write anything definitive or explicative about hiking trails on the back of a volcano for so many days in a row.

I had a few bad fights on the camping trip- which I can not fully blame the other person or people involved for, as much as I’d like to. I think I’d been caging things for a while inside walls and cars and offices that had nowhere to go in the absence of available doors to lock responses behind.

And truthfully, I had no temper to sort anything out on the trip. Instead, I lost myself in miscellaneous wads and wisps and endless unnamed wild things.

Then, back home to mondays and laptops and indoor plumbing and writing some letter like a man in the trenches inching forward on his stomach and elbows as close to the truth as he can get.

Still not understanding the juxtaposed warnings of various incarnations of myths, I left the red ohelo berries on their branches.

love and campfires,
Elizabeth