Palm trees are Maui icons.  They aren't exclusive to Maui, of course; even Las Vegas has them.  But Maui's palms are essential to Maui and to Maui ambiance.  The tallest, with their vibrant fronds clustered far up their slender trunks, are like shore-side sentinels, standing solo or in sparse arrays overlooking the intersection between the ocean and the island.  

In gentle breezes and vigorous blows, the trunks sway in accommodation and compromise, and the fronds sway in rhythm as necessary, as gently as graceful wrists and fingers in a slow hula, or as vigorously and loudly as the sticks on a snare drum, snapping and crackling, rustling, as if snares were shuffling about in the background, alternating between fast and slow, quiet and loud.  At night, when it is too dark to see them, the fronds play on, clacking and rustling, or maybe just rubbing like wire brushes across a drum head, the surf a muted timpani beneath.  

It is all part of the visual and auditory Maui experience.  It is a constant reminder you aren't in Kansas anymore, and that just as the palm trunks and fronds have swayed happily in calm and gale and sun and rain, you can do the same.  Cares dissipate.  Stress evaporates.  Worries recede, replaced by more immediate questions: what is for lunch?  should I turn the chair?  where should we bike tomorrow?  Maui reorders priorities.  Maui's priorities turn on wind, sun, rain, clouds.

These are some of the palms' most recent iconic images. 

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