Page 9 of Big Island Neighbors
Later, she would tell him that the family finances weren’t his responsibility. She was the mom, and she would figure things out.
For now, though, she just held him closer.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too.”
He dropped his arms and stepped back. “Is the frittata done?”
She smiled. Nothing could dampen a teenage boy’s appetite. “It’s on the stove.”
“Thanks.”
She squeezed his arm and walked outside to find her girls.
They would be okay. They would get through this.
She had everyone she needed right here.
3
Emma
Emma felt a sense of deep satisfaction as she gathered dinner from the garden.
It was early days, and most of what she had planted was still too small to produce food, but her garden was getting to the point that she could gather the backbones of their meals.
After multiple false starts and countless leafy lives lost to slugs and storms and wild pigs, harvesting any food at all felt like a victory.
Her garden was awash with green - not the weeds that she had worked so hard to clear, but the determined growth of food plants.
Cucumber vines wound their way up the fence that surrounded the garden, and the tomatoes were pushing out their first yellow flowers.
The sweet potatoes were well established too, their fast-growing vines spilling out over the sides of the beds and into the walkways.
Her new hobby was eating up more and more of her time, and she found that she didn’t mind one bit. She loved the quiet of life on the farm.
Living in her late husband’s childhood home, she felt deeply connected to him – and yet not constantly overwhelmed by the gaping hole that he had left behind, which was how she’d felt in the home that they’d shared in California.
This new life had taken her by surprise, and it was steadily healing her broken heart.
She loved walking outside at the first light of dawn and sitting with a cup of coffee as the colors of her Hawaiian garden came alive. She loved tucking seeds in the soil and watching them sprout. She even loved pulling weeds for hours in the hot sun.
But the best part was harvesting and eating food that she had grown herself.
So far, her main harvests were turnips, radishes, and leafy greens. Her sister Toni had sent all sorts of seed packets, and so even the early harvests were exciting and colorful.
Her harvest basket was filled with half a dozen different varieties of root veggies, including huge watermelon radishes that were pale green on the outside and hot pink when she cut them open. She topped them with handfuls of dark collard greens and purple-edged mustard leaves before walking back inside.
Back in the kitchen, she washed and chopped her harvest before cooking it all in a huge cast iron pan. Drizzled with the garlic honey that Tara had given them, the simple stir fry was a delicious meal.
Emma carried her bowl onto the back porch to eat. Zuko, the orange kitten that her son had saved from a pile of trash, jumped up onto the bench beside her. He meowed insistently until she gave him a piece of cooked radish - and stranger still, he ate it.
“Mom!” Kai sprinted up from the orchard and waved a stick in the air. “Mom, watch this!”
“I’m watching,” she called back.
“Dio, jump!” he held the branch low, and their Belgian Mallinois leapt over it.
