Cypress Moon

Somewhere sometime back I said something about sticky places, specks on the globe that have the power to hook a guy, play out the line sometimes for years before reeling him back, maybe let him take off on another run, but always that little bit of drag, that tugged lip, pointing back like Elvis's lip did to Memphis.


Maybe I also blurted out something about how new places keep sticking to me: ancestral farms and grandma's and mother's houses, gardens of my own, settlements Virginian and Hawaiian, grounds in both Washingtons. Maybe I revealed that Cypress Island is one of them near my latest abode.


And already it is clear that this island is where I will end up in the August moon. In the past two years, events have conspired to send me there and then. Today I learned that it will happen in the third as well: a descendant of the islands only Zoe (so far as I know) needed to reconnect with her kin's story and organized a trip, a coworker who took over a restoration project wants to walk the place with an archaeologist, and then there's me--more aware than ever that an August trip to Cypress is a treat not to be refused. 


Treat? I mean blessing. And so the fishing metaphor ends (because that would be a sham, as you aware of my paltry angling acumen must already be thinking), with me swimming willingly back to this place, as I hope to to Nu`alolo in the coming year. Lured by the aroma of those sweet springs, beckoning tendrils cast into the deep blue, that vast and shapeless world, luring the shad, o'opu, and salmon. 


So, maybe a fishing metaphor after all, but more of the ancient and collective "the run delivers fish" kind than the "guy in a bass-boat with an armada of lures" kind. Either way, I'm hooked.