16

A new day. A new life continues.

"Ohayou," Xena said over my shoulder.  I was painting on the church, it was still struggling along.

"Ohayou," she repeated while leaning over me and saying it an inch from my ear. 

"We're not in Ohio."

She pinched me. 

"Ohayou, good morning. Look what I traded for, a pretty good hibachi."

I stopped painting, it was close to a loss anyway.  She put a black grill type of thing on the ground.  It wasn't very large, maybe as big as my palette, 12 inches on a side, and about that tall.  She also carried a bag that she hadn't opened yet.

"This afternoon we'll say konnichiha," she opened her sack and pulled out two  musical cases.  Very small, like toy guitars.  One was maybe 18 inches and the other maybe 2 feet long. 

"This one is for me," she held up the smaller one, "and this one is for you," she push the second towards me until I took it.

"Aloha kakahiaka," Xena sang as she opened her case and took out the tiniest little guitar instrument that I've ever seen.  She dropped the case and and started strumming the little nylon strings and swaying like a girl from Hawaii.

"Aloha, aloha, aloha kaka kaka kakahiaka," she strummed and sang and danced around the van.  This went on for a few minutes then she stopped on her third time around.

"Aren't you going to open your case Moondoggie?  Aloha kakahiaka," she sang once again.

I unzipped the case and pulled out another small guitar like instrument.

"That's a mandolin," she told me.  I've seen them before but never thought what they were, or what they were called. 

"You can be the folk singer, like Woody Guthrie, working his way across the purple mountains and golden plains and I can be you Hawaiian gypsy maiden who dances and sings her way with you."

"Aloha music festival!  We'll go to Missouri and that festival we saw on the billboard yesterday."

It was true, we'd been driving west again, not having seen the crazy rabbit killers all week when we saw a billboard outside this small town that said to come to Missouri for the famous music festival.

"We don't know how to play good enough for a festival.  We actually don't know how to play, period."   I told Xena the Hawaiian Gypsy.
"It's a piece of pineapple," she said.  "We'll learn on the way to the festival."

Changing the subject, slightly, I asked where she'd got the instruments.

At the yard sale they were having across from the park where we were camping she told me. 

"I took one of your paintings  and traded it for these two instruments and the old lady threw in the hibachi.  Ohayou gozaimasu," she finished and bowed to me.

"Which painting?"  I asked, but not really caring, just curious.

"The one you finished two weeks ago, the one with the balcony on the farmhouse.  The lady liked it and said she'd been trying to get rid of junk in her house for years, ever since the kids moved out and her husband died.  But she did want something on her walls and we traded."

"Well, good" I told her.  Maybe we could do some more trading as we went through the summer, bunches of people have yard and garage sales during the summer.

"Aloha!" She said again.  "Time to try out your mandolin and sing like Izzy."

Izzy?