LB Says Hi

When a significant amount of time passes, you’re  suddenly able to see clearly again the cherished moments you had muddled with the bad. You can now separate the two and fondly remember what made you smile all that time ago. As corny as it sounds, t his frozen pizza has done that for me:  turned on a light where I had kept so many wonderful rememberings in the dark, because of pain. A while ago, in what seems like forever, there was a time when things were less complicated. With a few dollars to our name, we’d frequently buy pizzas — whether frozen or of the discounted variety (think Caesar’s $5 pizzas). We’d spruce these bland pies with avocado and drown each slice in hot sauce for extra flavor. Most nights were spent this way — nothing more than a box of pizza and a movie. Maybe it was the position of not having much that made us so appreciative, but at that time, things were somehow perfect. Moving forward as an adult, not needing to live off of...

There are a couple of places that I love as much as Oahu, my home. The first will always be Oregon, and the second, which appears to be a new-found love, is Kauai. My friends and I had the opportunity to travel to Kauai this past month for a college friend’s wedding. We planned and listed the things we wanted to do and the places we wanted to see, but nothing could have prepared us for the spontaneous beauty we encountered, nor could we have anticipated the memories that were made. The wedding was beautiful and perfect in every way. A lush, vast ranch as the wedding site, I couldn’t help but wonder if there were any plots of open land like this still left on Oahu, which continuously crowds with new housing, hotels and parking lots. Traveling through empty roads and past fields of greenery on Kauai, I couldn’t help but believe that this was the true Hawaii experience. We had some of our Oregon friends make the trip, and they remarked that Kauai was everything that they ...