Day Three: The Invention of a Friend

Day Three

Day three is being brought to you by Lemon Verbana also known as LV. She is whom I send out to do the hard jobs here around Miller Molokai a.k.a. Paradise. Just in case you thought all we did for a day was sit around and stare at plants (there is quite a lot of that) I have described for you below a typical "work" day.

Today LV woke up before the sun because she was actually excited to start shoveling all the mud from the walkway. She's crazy right? Do you see why I keep her around though?

(Side note: Whenever it rains here, which isn't very often, the long driveway becomes a torrential river carrying all the dirt, gravel and rocks from its expansive stream and placing them, very inconveniently I might add, onto the front steps of Paradise.)

I told LV that all the mud is going to come right back down with the next rain and she's going to have to shovel it all over again. She said she doesn’t mind. "It’s a meditative practice" she says, which doesn't make any sense to me and I doubt she knows what it means either. But hey, "Whatever floats your boat LV!" or should I say "whatever fills your shovel."

After the driveway was replaced I noticed her standing in the trees with lilikoi (passion fruit) juice squirting all over her face and clothes. She's like an animal with those things. Crawling through the brush her eyes will light up on one of those little yellow fruits and then with cat like intensity she will pounce upon it and begin devouring the thing like a woman starved.

One thing I know for sure: you do no want to get in the way of LV and her passion fruit. Watch out!

Next time I saw LV she was cleaning the pool. She was having a heck of a time with that vacuum hose. From where I was sitting it looked as if she was in the clutches of a giant sea squid. I went down to check out my hypothesis. She said she wasn’t sure if it was a sea squid or not. She cleaned the pool from top to bottom, up and down with the giant hose. "Boooring!" I said. "You have to do this every other day?"
"It's meditative," she said.
"Whatever LV."

Something even more crazy about LV is that she has a kindness in her heart like nothing else for a dead animal. Earlier in the day I saw her near the dumpster lifting a great big dead bull frog from the road and placing him in the grassy field so he could have a "proper resting place" she said. Later I found her underneath the house by the pool pump in the company of a dead centipede. She was really struggling because LV doesn't care much for centipedes. She gave him a name, Samuel, and said that's all she could do at the moment. I bet you anything that she goes down there tomorrow and digs Samuel a grave and says a few words. I tell you that LV is something else.

She worked hard all day long while all I did was clean the house and cut come flowers for the guests. I got myself one library card too and some good books on gardening. The LV and me, we are going to have one heck of a garden.

I'd have to say the best part of LV's day had to be when she went to the Plumeria Farm. She said there was a big dog barking and she didn't know if she should run or not, when all of a sudden a nice man named Dick came to the door. He walked with a cane and had a sadness behind smiling eyes. He would have reminded her of a friend she met during the war… if she had ever been to war.

He told LV that they didn't have any leis for her to bring to her guests but when he saw her deflate like a purple balloon he suggested she sit down, tell him a story and he would teach her to string a couple leis. LV just loves people like Dick. She told him about her day, the mud walkway, the dead animals, and the sea squid as they delicately threaded the soft perfumed petals into beautiful leis.