PARADISE REGAINED

Twenty-five years ago, Julie Orringer spent her honeymoon on Maui. Now, in the aftermath of fires that devastated the island, she returns with her family for a week of sun, sea, and service.

- Julie Orringer

THE HONEYMOON WAS A GIFT from my aunt and uncle, a trip we couldn’t have afforded on our own. At Maui’s Kahului Airport the air was humid silk, the sky pink, the clouds like piles of pale-gold feathers. We rented a white convertible and roared past plantations of sugarcane and pineapple, the dry fronds whipping in a brisk wind; ahead was the ocean, a turquoise gradient etched with papaya-colored light.

For 10 days we experienced a dizzying series of delights: the pool, the ocean, a reef of iridescent fish, a ride on a paragliding rig 300 feet over the water. One night we visited the Old Lāhainā Lū‘au; the next day we hiked through rainbow eucalyptus and walked on a black-sand beach. We ate shimmering slices of ahi; we discovered apple bananas, creamy as flan. We learned a few Hawaiian words: hale for house; keiki for children, which everyone encouraged us to have. We took hundreds of photos to record the distance we’d traveled from our lives.

ABOVE A performer at the Old Lahaina Lü'au in Maui. OPPOSITE The gardens at the Resort at Kapalua Bay.

When we got home, we printed the photos and put them in an album. Years passed. We moved to New York City and had children: a boy, then a girl. Sometimes, at quiet moments, the boy and the girl took out the honeymoon album and leafed through it. There were their parents as newlyweds, swimming with striped fish; there they were on the net of a catamaran. The children wanted to go to Maui, too. But Maui seemed not only impossibly far away; it was buried in the past, a place their parents had gone long ago.