Leaving Ordinary

Truthfully, I don’t even know how to describe it. I’ve been asked again and again in the last few weeks to impart what I saw, what it was like, and I find the words shift character each day. My mind digests a little more of the experience with time, and with each processing my opinion alters just a bit.

In August, my husband, Jake, and I celebrated our twentieth anniversary. At the time, despite the milestone, we didn’t do much to mark the occasion. Life is hectic in August. Sweet corn was ready to pick and sell, we had our fall-calving mama cows in Nevada getting closer to the start of calving season. I was preparing for a new school year. There were just so many good reasons to not to bother with celebrating at the time.

However, being a man of details, Jake took to heart a comment I made once about having a wish to see the sunset on the beaches of Hawaii. So, he made plans. When he told me I thought he was crazy. I’d meant it as a thing we would do when we were older. Our lives more steady and predictable. Of course, he commented he wasn’t sure what decade in life that happened, and I agreed it was an unrealistic ideal I’d been keeping since young motherhood. Surely there is a time for Hawaii and vacations. When the cows are settled and the house in order. I’d be a millionaire capable of paying someone for full-care of the horses and dogs.

But then I realized something important. Someday, my kids would be settled, too. No, not in the next grade or a freshly painted bedroom. I mean in their own life’s path. In their own purpose. Maybe even with babies of their own. Certainly with a schedule as wierd as mine. So, when Jake asked if we’d celebrate in Hawaii just the two of us, I said no. One thing I do know, is the years will come when the house is quiet and the laundry is strangely done. The chaos of kids and mini-Aussies trekking nonstop across the living room will fade. It’ll just be me waiting for Jake to get home from the farm.

The silence will be deafening.

Going to Hawaii I had just two things I wanted to do. Watch the sunrise, then later watch it set, over the ocean. It didn’t disappoint. At first it was hard to adjust to a life and schedule that was so drastically different from what I know. I think we all felt it. And, crazy as I am, one of the first delights I took on the island of Oahu was simply listening to the free-roaming roosters crow with the sunrise. Watching them scurry across the grass lawns below our hotel balcony.

Then, with awe, I got to watch my kids interact with an ocean for the very first time. I say interact, which seems different, but truly, it was an interaction. Like they met a life-long friend for the very first time. Without thought or reservation, they ran open-armed into the sea like they live next to a massive body of water instead of an ocean of sagebrush. No hesitation, no reservation. Just the complete appreciation of enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime chance, open-armed and ready.

I guess, maybe, when people ask what I thought about Hawaii, perhaps it isn’t that I can’t convey the magnitude of island life and pace. Maybe it isn’t even that I can’t express emotion for the beauty of the tropical ocean and terrain. Maybe, truly, it’s that I can’t express accurately what it felt like to sit on a glorious beach in the golden light of God and sunset, and watch my children in a time and moment that will never come again. To hold my husband’s hand and appreciate the enormity of creation, and our life.

So, when people ask me about Hawaii, I simply say, everyone deserves to see Hawaii. Just once.