Island life

Prologue

"We don't always marry the people who are souls belong to"

I remember my parents telling my brother and I the story on how they moved to Hawaii after they got married. My parents got married in '92 in Downing, Michigan. My mom said it was always cold and she hated the cold. One day in December 2 months after they got married their heater broke and they couldn't get it fixed until a few days later. My mom had a parka on while eating her breakfast when she said "ya know if we lived in Hawaii we wouldn't have this problem." My dad being well him said "Then why don't we move there." "You can't be serious my mom said just up and leave our family and friends our life and jobs??" "Well yeah!" "We could find new jobs and make new friends!" My mom said she wasn't sure if it was the fact that she was wearing a parka while eating breakfast or the fact that she liked my dad's crazy idea but she agreed and a few months later they moved. My parents found a house right next to the beach with a long porch and bunches of palm trees. My mom got a job working at a dentist office and my dad opened a real estate business. A year later they had my older brother Leo (and no it's not short for anything) then in '97 they had me Kaia Elizabeth Catherine, but it's just Kaia, Kaia Elizabeth Catherine was a mouthful. So my brother and I grew up with a beach as our backyard. We took surfing lessons and we are pretty much pros at beach volleyball. We didn't go to regular school my parents got us a private tutor and we had school 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. We would spend the first focused on the subject of the day and then the next two on a language. My brother and I became fluent in Spanish and French, because of this my mom said she liked that we didn't go to normal school she said it made us more well rounded that we spent our mornings being educated and our afternoons spent outside playing. My brother and I were best friends since we didn't go to normal school we really only had each other we went on adventures and went to the open market making friends with the people who had stories to tell and had experienced life. Our favorite person was Syd he would hand us some pomegranate seeds and tell us stories of the Vietnamese war that he fought in and how he would hide in the jungle to take out the bad guys. Syd used to say that being on island time was different than military time and he liked being laid back in his graying age. After visiting relatives for Christmas and Thanksgiving back in Michigan we finally understood what Syd meant by island time. Life in Hawaii was so much different than life on the mainland as Leo and I called it. People didn't seem as happy and content. So Leo and I counted our blessings, the blessings of living an island life.