Roses, handwritten notes evoke childhood memories

Roses, handwritten notes evoke childhood memories

As I walk through the gardens at Linekona, a Kamehameha butterfly’s wings catch the sun and I miss my mother, who planted roses and shell ginger in our yard and once sent me a stained-glass butterfly to brighten my New York window.

She loved art and music. From childhood she had trained to be a concert pianist, practicing for hours in her parents’ Whitmore Village home before rushing out to wander the countryside with her dogs.

When she was 12, her father quit the plantation and they moved to town. At her piano teacher’s orders, she wasn’t allowed to wash dishes because it might hurt her hands. Nobody knew she was playing basketball in the alley with the boys.

She was sent off to Oberlin College with cashmere sweaters, saddle shoes and a camel-hair coat. She met my father there and married him in New York’s Marble Collegiate Church at 29th and Fifth. We lived in New Haven, Conn., where I remember Mom playing Bach in gloomy apartments until she left Dad and moved home to Honolulu with my brother and me and her Steinway grand.

She would have three more husbands and five children in all. There was never time or money for her concert dreams, so she taught piano and kept the books for her father’s business, Halm’s Kim Chee. She asked to take it over when he retired, but he refused. It was rough work, not for his uptown girl.

At 73, she was paralyzed on her right side and rendered speechless by a stroke. I had never been good at piano, but now it provided a means to communicate. Mom sat beside me in her wheelchair, and after I’d stumbled to the end of a piece she’d give her half-smile and pat my arm.

When she died, my son remembered accompanying her on errands when he was little. “She was so beautiful, the salespeople would smile as if she was a Disney princess and they were about to break into song.”

Now, in the season of her birth and death, her yellow roses bloom. Fresh winds play through the house where I’ve returned to stay, and my son drops by and plays Bach from the New Haven book with notations in her hand.