When I was twenty~one

When i was twenty~one.

Yesterday – 6:51pm

At the age of 21, I was in love with a Tongan fellow, so we married, and i quickly became pregnant with my first son Hanale, the first of three sons born very close together. I was working in the "Hawaiian Host Chocolates" Factory, on the assembly line. Rotting macadamia nuts were easily tossed away from the good ones, along with good bits and pieces to be put into a smaller candy, but it was all beginning to make me very nauseous in my early trimester. So, seemed it was time to move on and find other work, yet again...I just had to leave, since vomit would not be much appreciated on that line, no matter how cool my co-workers were.
I remained friends with one couple for my whole stay in the Islands, Peter and Mary-Jane. Peter was part Hawaiian, and Mary-Jane was a beautiful Filipino girl much younger than him, they had two children together, and kept little dogs as companion/friends.

My new husband and I had recently positioned ourselves away from uncle Aso's farm, leaving him to it...as he was, happily, before we sort of took his place over for those few months while he gave us a place to stay together. My new husband Tui had a job on a coffee farm with lodging benefits...so we paid a lower rent than average. And once again work was just outside our front door (like the nut farm) and very convenient for both the coffee farmer to call on Tui at any hour, and nice for us as we got cheaper rent and had no commute, well I still had a lot of commuting to my beaches for the surf and sun I "needed"...we adopted a sweet dog we called Shadow, and had a little Toyota to get around in.

We now lived even closer to my favorite, in fact we were living on Nappo'opo'o road in Capt.Cook...and close to plenty other fine beaches as well. The coffee farming became very much a part of our daily lives. In "coffee~season" my sweetheart worked from before sunrise, until the daily "GRIND" work was done, sometimes until very late at night, sometimes all the way until midnight or even later, it was sometimes frustrating but lasted only several months of the year, when bloom has become blossom, and cherry has formed...and then regular working hours ensued. Usually the only breaks were his long meal breaks, when we ate something together at home and often made love, before he left for work again. That part was pretty ideal, I must say, as I was accustomed to having a lot of alone time before I met him, so I was not lonely.

I began to work there also, after a while, for low wages, mainly for the experience, Tui was making enough to support us, but I enjoyed learning about coffee. I helped load bags of cherry into the pulping machines, rake it across our sliding rooftop, it was very wet when the pulp or "cherry" was removed, and then I'd rake it periodically throughout the day, about every hour or two depending on dampness and such, until it eventually dried over days, if the rains came I had to close the roof, it slid over the field below and back again easily on a pulley system, at the first smell or notice of rain I went running to pull it shut. Tui was out doing more picking and weeding and fertilizing when off season, and we worked together when they brought more full bags to be processed, we enjoyed doing these things together.

I learned pretty much every facet of the (small) coffee farming industry myself, except for the roasting bit, because that was over by our landlords place about a mile distant, and finances, I didn't get involved with money bit of course, my husband learned to roast coffee too, in huge cauldrons or "roasters", over by our landlords place. I was a COFFEE PROCESSOR, anyway, I guess you'd call it, but there is possibly another, more official term for what I did. Well, I did that for some months, until I was too pregnant to be of any real help. The coffee cherry that had been removed lied there near our house, decomposing under the shade of our place, and surprisingly did not make me sick like the smell of the rotting macadamia nuts. I survived it with a lot of Joni Mitchell and Duran Duran playing on my stereo, as I recall, and I WAS Hungry Like a WoLf. For my husband, and for whatever life had to hand out to me.

After some time I also graduated to being a fairly good COFFEE PICKER...I had avoided it for many months, since my during my first go at it, no one really showed me how to pick well, it may have been a prank (Tongan folks love pulling pranks), but I was oblivious, Tui had set me up with a picking basket and said lets see who does best...the competition was on! But I was picking them berry by berry off of the branches, one cherry at a time, so I looked like a fool, about half an hour later, when I had only about two inches in the basket (strapped to my belly) and my guy had a five gallon bucket full, to my recollection. I basically gave up the idea that I could pick coffee at all, for a long time after that day!

Eventually I could pick a ninety to one-hundred pound bag, in just about an hour, like most everyone else , and coffee paid better than mac nuts, more like ten dollars a bag, (they sold for waaay more to the middle man or "manufacturer") even way back then, in 1983. Ten bucks an hour was okay, especially when your hubby was making that also, or more...I will always remember people that I met working on that farm, especially Pita and Michella who were another "mixed" couple like us, pita was Tongan also, and Michella was "Caucasion" like myself. They had four little girls and were hoping for a boy to be born to them, soon.
I am not sure but i believe they actually had a fifth child another girl, I think of them on occasion & hope for their happiness.