In the stillness of midnight when even the neighborhood dogs are quiet and resting, that's when the images come.

"I can just see it like I'm right there, climbing the ladder, picking coffee, just like I'm there in Kona with them."

Jean Misaki Matsuo's vivid recollections of the hard, wholesome life her parents wrought out of a Kona hillside have made her a uniquely successful and beloved author.

Her two memoirs, "Dear Okaasan" and "Arigato Otoosan," were self-published, spiral bound like a 4-H Club cookbook and sold not in book stores or Amazon.com, but old-fashioned cottage-industry style: People came to her house or wrote letters in longhand to place their order. Books were mailed one by one or, when someone could drive her, hand-delivered to eager readers all over the island. One woman caught the bus from Hale'iwa to Matsuo's Kane'ohe home to pick up a copy. Another rode a bicycle all the way from Punalu'u.

Matsuo's books are available in only one store on O'ahu, a shop owned by her grade-school friend, who happens to be designer Mamo Howell. Only two stores on the Big Island, where the stories are set, carry her work: Book Gallery in Hilo and Kimura's Lauhala Store in Kona.

How many books has she sold? Matsuo, now 78, seems embarrassed to admit her success. She lowers her eyes and considers her answer a while before speaking: "Thousands," she says softly, in a way that makes you wonder if she's actually underestimating to be modest.

Indeed, her work table is stacked with boxes of letters that came to her from around the islands and around the country. The letters are thank-yous from readers grateful to her for sharing the stories of her family, for documenting a lifestyle so different from our modern times, and for validating the beauty and grace of a homemade, fish and rice, barefoot and big-hearted existence.

In those quiet midnight hours, Matsuo answers every one of the letters by hand, refusing to let arthritis get the best of her careful script.

Matsuo's gift is her ability to remember details — how her father made everything by hand, even the bed mattresses, which he stuffed with dried grass; how he made brooms and rakes and all the kitchen utensils from bamboo harvested from the nearby forest; how the vegetables her mother grew in their yard tasted so sweet after a long day at the beach.

And the way she remembers these things is unique as well: always with a kind of amazed gratitude.

"He never bought me a toy, not even a ball to play with," Matsuo wrote about her father. "He never put his hands in his pocket to give me a nickel to buy a candy bar. ... But he made the finest buranko (swing) under the tallest avocado tree in our back yard so that I could pretend to soar like an eagle over the mountains. ..."

Daughter Joann Matsuo is encouraging her mother to start on a third book, one that would focus on her years as a wife and mother. The working title, which is something of a family joke, is "I Married a Samurai."

"I think a lot of women can relate," Joann says.

But in those quiet writing hours, when the memories of childhood are close enough to step inside, Matsuo struggles with her stiff hands and the emotions that come when wisdom revisits childhood memories. Those were days of hard work, simple joy and deep appreciation, and writing about them is that way, too.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.