What Maui Looks Like Right Before You Leave It

I try not to rush the last mornings. Before the emails start and the days accelerate and the restaurant pulls me back into its orbit, I step outside on to the lanai. The pool mirrors the blue above it. The palm trees softly pushed and pulled by trade winds. There is a pair of dragonflies that bob and flit over the water every morning. There is birdsong trilling out of the trees. There are butterflies, actual butterflies, moving amongst the lilikoi vines that creep over from our neighbor’s side of the fence. 

The air at that hour is clean and unencumbered by the inevitable humidity that will lift off of the surrounding seas. Right now, the trade winds play on my skin like a whisper. I sit at my table and try to take it all in, in the way of chewing slowly when you know the meal is almost over. This is a kind of squirreling away of energy, a power charge. The capture of a core of tranquility I will carry into the weeks ahead, into the airports and the dirty cities and the artificial stimulation that will define the next summer trip. Mana that I will reach back to when I need it.

Memories of these mornings are an anchor every time I leave. When we were displaced after the fires, when we had lost the restaurant and the regular rhythms of our life all at once, these mornings were what I missed most. This poolside ritual and the birds and the winds and the stillness that exists, improbably, ten steps from my bedroom door. There is nothing in the world equivalent to these mornings. And they alone make it hard to leave.

The ways that I am fed here makes leaving hard too. Like the mornings out on the lanai, there is a sense of  comfort, knowing, nourishment and confidence at our restaurant, and others, that rivals many places where I have eaten in Italy- and New York. Being away means that many meals out will be hit or miss. And eating in, in Airbnb kitchens stocked with cheap plates and disposable pans will not present the same even if we source high quality local produce and product. The comfortable confidence we find in cooking in our own kitchen will have to be rebuilt from scratch in someone else's.

So before I go I eat. My last poke bowl, the real kind, not the mainland approximation. Saimin. Huli huli chicken. Mixed plates. I eat all of the mango and the passionfruit and the dragonfruit knowing I will not touch them anywhere else because there is no point. Some things only taste right in the place they come from. 

I take in how our restaurant feeds me in a different way too, not just its beautiful food but its rituals, my team, the familiar faces, the guests who have become something closer to family over the years. I will miss them most of all. 

And only one year in at our new location and sitting squarely in a different Lahaina landscape, Sale Pepe is still young. Still finding itself, still vulnerable in the ways that new things are vulnerable, still needing more of me than I sometimes have to give. But I have learned that traveling is the equivalent of being a working mother. You go out into the world to find fuel to bring back. You leave for inspiration and new perspectives and the chance to see what is happening beyond the edges of your own kitchen. New York and Italy will feed Sale Pepe on my return in ways I cannot anticipate from here. I go, in part, for her.

And underneath all of it, deeper than the mornings and the meals, are things even harder to name. Maui is the place where I can be my truest self. Hawaii gives you something that New York and Italy, for all their extraordinary gifts, cannot. It is not the beauty, though the beauty is real. It is the permission. Because aloha is not only a greeting. It is a philosophy of radical acceptance and openness and love that seeps into daily life in ways you stop noticing until you leave and suddenly feel their absence everywhere.

Here, I move without armor. Open, bright, curious, unhurried. The hard New York swag that I carry on the mainland, that focused self-containment, the eyes forward, the primal awareness of everything around me at all times, has no place here. It would be ridiculous here. And it is heavy. 

The minute I land at JFK it clicks back into place. Instantly. As practical as putting on a coat on a cold day. I immediately pick up my pace to match and move in this  focused energy, like a bullet finding its line. We all instinctively stay out of each other's way. It is its own kind of grace. 

And in the back of my mind, even then, I am already thinking about coming home. That is the thing about Maui that I could not have told you before I lived here. You leave already looking forward to coming back. This island is a place so specific and so special that the return is not an ending but the whole point. Every departure is already a homecoming.

You just have to get on the plane first.