Dear ,

After three flights, 36 and a half hours of travel, and a ridiculously small amount of sleep, I'm back home again.

I learned a lot of history while I was in a Hawai'i, and I believe most of it—about Pearl Harbor and Captain Cook, King Kamehameha  and tsunamis, coffee growing and volcanic eruptions, sugar cane plantations and visiting celebrities—is true. 

But whether or not Mark Twain really planted a monkey pod tree in the tiny Big Island town of Waiohinu in 1866—that may be hearsay.

Twain himself didn't mention it, and a number of people have looked for substantiation with no luck. Still, it made for a great afternoon, searching down a small spot in a tiny town which Mark Twain definitely visited, standing in the same latitude and longitude where he stood 152 years ago. A master of hyperbole, humor, and truth-stretching, he was not above a bit of hearsay himself. 

What is true is that Twain  loved Hawai'i in 1866 and that it helped him launch his career.

He always yearned to return. Here are some words of Twain's about Hawai'i that describe the feel of of these islands exquisitely:

For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas

flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear;

I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades,

its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits

floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit

of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks;

in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished

twenty years ago.

And that's no hearsay. I experienced this myself.

Love and light,

Maureen

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