The Woman from HOVE

I’ve lived in Hawaii all of my life, most of it on the largest island that’s also called Hawaii. When I was in grade school, there was a weekly hometown newspaper known as the Kona Torch. Written, printed, and distributed by no more than three people, that ambitious energy came out of a small office space in the town of Kainaliu. Pages were bound on the left side by three staples. A small mailing label was pasted right on the front page and it arrived neat, unwrapped.

My favorite read was a column written by a woman who lived further south, in a then isolated area called Hawaiian Ocean View Estates (HOVE). At the time, she more than likely had a generator for electricity, if needed. When it rained, the water pouring onto her roof would flow through a catchment system and into a storage tank. Tank water was sweet then.

She lived alone with a couple of furry pets and I’m guessing that she saved herself the drive and mailed her articles to her editor, some 40 miles away. Back then, no one expected any breaking news and her column wasn’t even dated. I was fascinated by her mundane stories. Stories that didn’t need to be fact checked.

Before I began reading on my own, fairytales were brought to me by my mother. She had the most incredible collection of character voices which made it easy to imagine hunched and hungry old witches and nasty trolls under bridges.

Stories written by the woman down south though, didn’t begin with “once upon a time” or end with the promise of living “happily ever after”. Her friends appeared unexpectedly with boxes of papayas, mangoes, re-folded newspapers from Honolulu, and an occasional paperback novel. I think I gave them faces and voices based on what she wrote. I was just a curious child, captivated by the words she used to paint her world, paragraph by paragraph. This was her life, in the middle of it all.

I thought of The Woman from HOVE as I started stumbling my way through this writing space. I never knew her name or saw a picture of her and the sound of her voice was my own. Still, she comes to mind when I'm writing, when I wonder if my stories are mundane. Sometimes I think I hear her say, “just do it” and it’s still my voice I hear.

She is my muse. I suspect I’ll create an image of her soon.

Aloha.