By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

My wife and I were having an argument about an imaginary fireplace in a home we haven't built on land we don't own.

I was holding out for a good, old-fashioned wood-burning fireplace. My wife thought the gas-burning type might be OK. Neither one of us liked the idea of an electric fireplace.

An electric fireplace, we agreed, is one of those self-canceling phrases like jumbo shrimp. With an electric fireplace, there are no flames and no fire. Where's the romance in that? How does that even qualify as a fireplace, except to someone who has never seen the real thing?

"Maybe it gives off a lot of heat," my wife suggested.

Heat has been at the heart of this discussion we've been having for the past 25 years. We both left cold winters behind us for good when we landed in Hawai'i, and while it's not the warm weather that keeps us here, it's not a factor we undervalue, either.

Why, then, were we prowling around a semi-developed subdivision in Volcano — a place that's notoriously wet, cool and foggy — with a real estate agent's map in hand, hacking our way through uncleared rain-forest lots filled with ferns and 'ohi'a trees that thrive only in cold, dreary places, searching for just the right piece of the volcanic rock to call our own?

Because I've always wanted a fireplace, that's why. And because my wife, who would prefer to get her heat from the sun at the beach that's just three blocks away from our home in Kailua, loves me dearly, that's why.

By end of the weekend, we had picked out a nice, heavily wooded lot just far enough away from the highway, just close enough to the national park and just cheap enough, maybe, to start us dreaming about imaginary floor plans.

Never mind that the land we chose has no electricity, running water or sewers. Never mind that we hadn't even made an offer on the land yet. Never mind that we don't have any money to build even the smallest cabin on the land. Never mind that we don't even have enough money to regularly pay the sky-high airfares (pray for ferries!) they charge these days for what used to be called Neighbor Island getaways.

Hey, when a man has dreams of a romantic hideaway you don't talk to him about practicalities. You act now and worry about details like financing later.

Anyway, there we were in a late-night Hilo restaurant (late night in Hilo being about 9 p.m.) making plans over beers and hot tea for our imaginary home, drawing on ideas gleaned from a lifetime's worth of reading House Beautiful, Architectural Digest and Field & Stream.

Pretty much, I was willing to leave the small stuff, like the type of construction, number of bedrooms, and how to provide safe drinking water, to my wife.

I was concentrating instead on the really big picture, the one where we needed to know where the fireplace — the good, old-fashioned wood-burning fireplace — would go, because when you're dreaming about romance, you want to make sure the sparks really do fly.

Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.