Each human dwelling place has its stories; this one’s no exception. This image tonight brings me in mind of things both warm and cold…

Looking at the house as I walked uphill after taking the trash, its warmth struck me yet again: constructed largely by our amateur carpenter’s hands, it is a Habitat for Humanity home—built out of love and donated, inexpensive materials. It took a long time, but we finished it, and when we were done, Aunty and the kids were no longer homeless.

The quicksilver moonlight washes over it, as it does in its monthly cyclical passage. Obscuring now the always-startling sash of the Milky Way—so clear above mostly-dark upcountry Maui—the light is cold. Speaks of cold. Of luminous fields of snow and ice, of alien landscapes far from these pacific islands, but suggestive of certain things transpired.

Because this habitation soon became a halfway-house for the marginalized, the desperate, the needful. Family members who were released from prison, ex-cons, some who were quitting cold turkey from that scourge they called ice. And yes, the homeless, among them Aunty Kehau and old Papa Willie, now dead lo these few months.

In all this, one grounding, compassionate constant: Aunty Mattie’s fierce and uncompromising love. And they all made it somehow, even the ones who have passed on. Some nights I look up at this house, considering it yet again. And it feels like I’ve been living in the pages of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. Or a Salman Rushdie one. Or a Toni Morrison story. The stories it could tell! Those thin walls, that simple roof, those windows so open to the light, and to the others… arriving, leaving | raging, calming | crying, healing. Being.

I was a witness to all that. In silence, and inscribed.