pineapple shortage – A birthday trip to Hawaii turned into a test of patience and partnership when storms disrupted flights, canceled plans, and left her unable to find pineapples—even at Costco. The experience shaped a decade-plus perspective on marriage, community, and the slow
When Deidre DeJear landed on Maui around 2 a.m., she wasn’t thinking about storms. She was thinking about whale watching—and about one lifelong dream: eating a real Hawaiian pineapple.
Her husband, Marvin, had the details planned out, but he stayed behind to deliver an important presentation. DeJear slept about an hour, then tuned into the virtual presentation and headed to the grocery store.
She expected the kind of simple abundance you imagine when you picture Hawaii. Instead, she walked into a store with “not one pineapple in the whole entire store. Not one!” Automatic doors opened, but the shelf reality was brutal. A clerk sent her to Costco.
So she bought groceries anyway—more than $200. including enough dumplings for “two armies. ” all the poke she could find. and ingredients for Aperol Spritzes—because it was her birthday and she was determined to celebrate. Right as she left, torrential rain began to pour. The paper bags disintegrated before she could even get them into the car.
The storm didn’t pass. It rotated over the island. And it set off the next chain of delays: for two days, Marvin’s flights kept getting pushed back. At one point, DeJear asked him, “Are you sure you want to come?”
Even as the weather worsened, their conversation wasn’t only about logistics. DeJear says she’d been asking herself whether time alone might help her think through what had been lingering in their relationship—especially when conflict didn’t get resolved within 24 to 48 hours.
On the phone, Marvin waited through the delays and stayed steady. “I’m coming,” he declared. “I’m coming.”
The question of whether to keep moving followed her from the airport to the road back into town. When Marvin finally took off, DeJear drove the 30 miles from their resort to the airport and—of course—back to Costco. She didn’t forget about her pineapple.
But now she was driving a red Nissan Altima with the kind of storm conditions that turn roads into warnings. Rain pounded. The sky looked dark as midnight in the middle of the afternoon. Winds rose. The road to town was literally on the edge of a cliff. The tide was whipped up by the storm and waves beat her rental car.
She describes feeling like she was trapped inside a thriller movie—yelling at herself to go back, while one part of her urged retreat and another insisted she keep going to “get your man.” She made it through flash flooding and falling rock.
At the airport, she traded the Altima for a sturdier Jeep. The rental car attendant—seasoned by whatever storms life had thrown at him—told her, “Oh, stay, stay.” When she asked “Should I stay or should I leave?” he answered, “The people leaving are wimps.”
DeJear drove to Costco anyway. When she arrived, it was raining inside, too. The warehouse’s roof couldn’t stand up to the weather. She found a clerk—described as a native Hawaiian woman who “looks like she’s built for this type of storm”—and asked the same question the attendant had answered: “Should I stay or should I leave?”.
After survival pointers, the clerk suggested something that felt practical in a crisis: “Why don’t you download the weather app?” Once DeJear did, alerts pinged in all caps: “SHELTER IN PLACE. FLASH FLOODING.”
Then came the second blow: Costco had no pineapples. None.
When Marvin landed, the weather didn’t look like it was clearing soon. They were forced to decide whether to stay where they were in town or head back to the villa. Forward travel meant near-impossible return.
They tried to call for help—2-1-1, 4-1-1, 9-1-1—but no one answered. In the moment, DeJear says, the realization landed hard: no one was going to take this ride for them. So they decided to try.
The Jeep got them back safely. For the next two days. the island seemed to run on rain—DeJear says it rained “like the clouds were faucets left on full stream.” The food she’d bought?. They ate it—“Dumplings for days.” Their events and excursions were canceled. Without the outside schedules, they turned inward.
They talked. They laughed. They played games, and DeJear says she beat Marvin in every game they played. When the weather finally cleared enough on the last day of the vacation, they managed to do the two excursions they’d been holding onto.
They went whale watching and DeJear says she saw calves and their mamas, “and it was breathtaking.” Then they went to a pineapple farm. This time, it wasn’t just about buying. It was about learning.
On the tour, she learned that pineapples aren’t a rushed fruit. They have to be planted in specific conditions. tended with care. protected from elements. and watched for months before anything appears. It takes 18 months to two years to produce a pineapple. and even then a mother plant will only yield one pineapple in its lifetime.
DeJear describes how that shifted into the lesson she says she’d been trying to answer since she arrived in Hawaii: the fruit’s lifecycle—and the patience required—felt like a mirror for marriage.
Planting. she says. is like the wedding vow: putting something into good soil. when two willing individuals agree to grow together. Rooting is what happens before fruit is visible—learning each other’s hopes, dreams, fears and goals, and forming strength. Sprouting shows that nurtured roots are working. and she says the pineapple blooms into a flower she calls the most beautiful and unique she has ever seen.
In pineapple farming, she says, seeing the first sight of fruit is called “crowning,” when the fruit bursts from the ground and the leaves splay like a laurel. That stage, she says, is about potential. Maturation is the deep part, because a pineapple doesn’t ripen overnight.
For DeJear, a strong marriage matures through forgiveness, sacrifice, laughter, and choosing each other again and again.
Harvest is the blessing—the sweetness after tending and protection and belief. And she returned to the question that had started it all: why she couldn’t find pineapples at Costco.
She learned there was a pineapple shortage on the island. An influx of rain had caused fields to fruit early, creating a summer surplus and a fall shortage. On top of that, field animals needed their cut, too, and farmers couldn’t adjust fast enough.
She says the comparison stuck: sometimes conditions shift, storms come in, something disrupts what’s been growing, and what you expect to yield doesn’t show up at harvest. But that doesn’t mean throwing the fruit out. It means tending again, protecting again, and believing again.
DeJear and Marvin marked 15 years of marriage on June 11. She says that at the start of the trip, she thought she needed time alone with her thoughts—but what she really needed was time alone with Marvin, without distractions, to tend the cycle of their marriage.
When they returned, those lessons didn’t stay only inside their relationship. DeJear frames the same idea—relationships “have their ebbs and flows”—across friendships, families, workplaces and communities, with the same commitment to endure despite difficulty.
She also ties the experience to something broader than storms and fruit: the idea of protections that help people survive disruptions. She says the only hardship that didn’t hit the pineapple fields this year was a major dam breaking. calling dams a constant looming threat for farmers. Dams are necessary in Hawaii to protect property and preserve life.
She adds that the U.S. has built physical dams like the Hoover Dam. and also “figurative dams. ” such as the First Amendment. the Second Amendment. the Thirteenth Amendment. the Nineteenth Amendment. the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. She describes how generations built those protections because they understood life, liberty and freedom had to be preserved.
Her point comes through in the way she connects cracks to failure: when people turn their backs on each other. when they give up on each other or lose sight of what each person brings. she says tiny cracks appear in the dam. Over time, she says, it becomes more apt to fail—less equipped to protect and preserve.
What she says she knows now is that the relationship easiest to walk away from can be as consequential as the one hardest to leave—whether it’s marriage, friendship, a relationship with a colleague, a community, or the country.
The work, she says, is the same: tend, protect, believe. And when the storm comes, focus isn’t on how to escape. It’s on how to get through.
DeJear’s story was told June 2 as part of “Tell It Like It Is: Iowa Storytellers Project. ” funded by the Hoyt Sherman Place Foundation in partnership with the Des Moines Register. These stories can be republished by any Iowa newspaper. The next storytellers event is “Voyages” on Sept. 29. If people have a story to tell for that event, they can reach out at stories@hoytsherman.org by July 20.
Deidre DeJear, identified in the source as former Iowa gubernatorial candidate, leads Iowa’s largest affordable housing complex. She serves on the boards of the City of Des Moines Housing Services, The Directors Council, and the Wright Foundation, and serves as a member of The Links Incorporated.
Courtney Crowder is listed as the senior writer at the Register who can be reached at ccrowder@dmreg.com.
Deidre DeJear Marvin Hawaii storms pineapples whale watching Costco shortage marriage lessons Iowa Storytellers Project