Of weak coffee and wistful waiting

My coffee tastes a little weak this morning.

My husband usually makes the coffee, and he has learned to make it to the strength I prefer. He’s in Kansas at a funeral, however, and I made my own coffee this morning.

My morning routine has been broken — we usually get up around 5 AM (me bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, him not so much) and sit together for breakfast and coffee and sharing cat memes on the Internet. Now I’m on my own and it’s 6 AM and very quiet in here. I’m trying to share cat memes with Buddy the Cat, but he remains disinterested.

It’s been less than 24 hours since he left, and I miss Richard. It’s been over ten years married, and I still miss Richard. Not in a huge heart-rending way, but in the little things. I imagine this would be a hard thing, maybe the hardest thing to bear, if he died before I did — the low-key, everyday presence.

He’ll be home about 7, 34 hours after I last saw him. No big deal. Just … when you’re older, love is less about passion and more about sharing cat memes.

The Wind Chill

The temperature at this moment is -17 F (-22 C) with windchills of -32 F (-35.5 C). At this temperature, any exposed skin will develop frostbite in ten minutes. The US Postal Service suspends deliveries to save its workers from literally freezing to death and schools shut down. Outdoors could kill me today with very little effort, if I were to venture out and stay there.

I’m not sure why I got out of bed this morning. It’s hard even thinking about moving, even in a blessedly warm house, with temperatures outside like that. It’s bitterly cold outside, and my body wants to eat high-carb food, gain twenty pounds of fat, and hibernate for the winter.

I will do nothing of the sort. I have coffee to drink, blankets to swath myself in, books to edit. I have gardens to plan. I defy the chill, even though it frightens me with its potency outside.

Welcome to My Winter Morning

Sunday morning, and Richard and I sit on the couch over coffee and Baroque music.

Our living room provides comfort with cream and burgundy and dark wood. Clutter from projects and plant catalogs litter the coffee table as garden planning helps us through the winter days. I sit on the couch next to Richard with a lap desk on my lap, tapping on the keys of a Microsoft Surface. Words come slowly today; maybe the coffee hasn’t taken effect yet.

The beans that Richard roasted came from Malawi, and the coffee brews up rich and brown sugar sweet with a slight herbal note. Yo-Yo Ma plays Bach on cello over a set of old yet functional speakers.

Chucky, the big butterscotch-colored cat, races upstairs chasing an unseen sprite. Me-Me, grey tabby and white, regards us with her huge, wondrous green eyes. Snowy, pitch-black and ironically named, sits in front of the fake fireplace warming herself by electric heat. Girlie-Girl, calico patched, demands something. Richard shrugs his shoulders and tells the cat he has no idea what she wants.

I light a candle, and the scent of sandalwood wafts to me. I drink my second cup of coffee and think about the seeds cold-stratifying in the refrigerator and other seeds in their packets waiting for the right time to be introduced to soil and water. It’s winter outside, and the weather forecast says it will get even colder, but for now I sit in my warm house on a Sunday morning.

My Relationship with Coffee

I grew up with the same coffee served across the country in the 1970’s and 1980’s — coffee in a can from the grocery store, left to oxidize once opened to the air, brewed in an automatic drip machine which made a weak, brown, bitter brew that I doctored with lots of cream and sugar as an adolescent.

I discovered real coffee late in high school, when I spent the weekend with my dad in the college town where he’d been assigned to install some electronics for AT&T. I was sixteen then; he took me to a coffeehouse called The Daily Grind, and we sat down to some coffee. I took one sip of that cup and decided two things: I would go to school at the University of Illinois, and I would drink more of that coffee. Both of those things would come to pass.

When I arrived at college, I had a yard-sale percolator and a can of Folgers among my belongings, but I quickly abandoned them for coffeehouse brew. One day, I realized that one could actually buy beans at the coffeehouse and take them home to brew. I bought some for myself and for my parents, and although my parents proclaimed my coffee “too strong”, they appreciated the difference right before they went back to canned coffee from the store.

Once I left college 11 years later with a Ph.D., the coffee renaissance had begun. When I had started college, Champaign-Urbana had one coffeehouse; there were at least 5 when I left. Starbucks had not opened up the corporate coffee scene, but it was lurking in the wings. I ground my own coffee and brewed it in a press pot; this attention to detail (and deep, bold coffee) marked me as a coffee snob.

What the coffee renaissance really opened up, however, was home experimentation. Ways of brewing coffee thought previously lost — cold toddy brew with its smoothness, the aforementioned French press coffee, moka’s near-espresso richness, the fullness of vacuum pot coffee — found their adoptees. Home coffee roasting –using everything from air poppers to expensive drum roasters — appealed to the most experimental. Single-origin beans followed, and coffee drinkers became connoisseurs much like wine drinkers

Today, I drank a single-origin Malawi coffee that my husband roasted in the basement. It was as fresh as could be drunk; coffee is best if given a two-day rest after roasting. As precious as this sounds, the coffee beans are cheaper than those already roasted in the stores, and the nuances between coffees make each cup an exploration.

I don’t know if my relationship with coffee could get any better with this.

beans are cheaper

Just Write

I can’t get my thoughts to coalesce.

I’ve tried three times to write on topics — the beginning of the semester, growing older, expecting more from people — and the topics keep winding around in circles until I don’t know what the topic is anymore.

It could be because I haven’t had my coffee yet, I suppose.

Ever have one of those days? “There’s something … bothering me … but I can’t for the life of me figure out what.” It’s that sort of feeling. There’s an elusive topic, something my heart needs to write about, but I don’t know what it is and my brain’s having none of it.

Now I have my coffee — home-roasted and fresh-ground, so you can feel jealous of me — and I’m still not sure what the topic is.

The ideas to write aren’t always there. At five in the morning, I’m not always there, either.

The idea, though, is to write and keep writing. Even if the words aren’t flowing, even if you don’t know if you’re making any sense, keep writing. Keep your pen ready, keep your fingers warmed up. Write something.

You’ll have to go back and edit it anyhow.

Sleep Hangover

Sometimes my body just decides to take over in scheduling rest into my life.

I was sleeping, body, honestly. I was getting eight hours of sleep a night. Why did you decide I needed to take a 20-hour nap?

I’m still a bit sleepy today, probably hung over from all the sleep. The coffee has done no good. I need to WAKE UPPPP!

Donations for more coffee will be accepted. Send pictures of coffee.

Review: Board Game Cafe, Maryville MO

We have a small business in our town called Board Game Cafe, and it turns out that they’re the best coffeehouse in town. I don’t know how well they build a cappuccino, and their menu doesn’t offer the frappufoofoocino of their local competitors, but everything I’ve tried on their menu (including the pastries supplied by Ali, our town’s excellent baker) passes the coffreehouse test. For welcoming space, they’ve won the title in Maryville, in my opinion.

Coffeehouse atmosphere is not a difficult thing for the most part. It shouldn’t be shiny, it shouldn’t be crowded, it should be a bit quirky with perhaps primitive cabinets or old school shelves or found items on the wall. It should have its own personality — when corporate coffee chains try to duplicate the look, they fail. Board Game Cafe has a spacious look, with a second-hand couch and chairs in the front window, and sets of tables (because it is a board game cafe as well) along the front. The color scheme is grey/white/black and, although it could use a little more color and quirk, perhaps from game-themed posters, it’s unique for a coffeehouse because of its board game theme (as opposed to jute coffee sacks other coffeehouses have). I wish they had a little bit more brown and less grey in their palette to provide a warm feeling, but for the most part it carries off the coffeehouse aesthetic well.

All the Cafe needs to be a real coffeehouse is clientele, because a good coffeehouse cultivates a set of regulars who provide the incentive for other people to discover after peering through the windows. The Cafe doesn’t get a lot of traffic right now, at least in part because it doesn’t yet have Wi-Fi. They’re holding out until they get enough profit to buy some muscular security for a Wi-Fi system, and I can’t blame them given liability potential. Until then, I bring my hot spot in if I want to write there.

Anyone out there: Would you like to help this coffeehouse realize this potential? Visit it. Have coffee with your friends. Play a couple board games (they have everything from Dungeons and Dragons to CandyLand.) Tell me what you think.

WAKE UP!

I’m trying to write something meaningful, and I’m failing. Mostly because I’m falling asleep at my desk.

I could write down the stream of consciousness I face when I sleep, but there is a green field far away/I hope to find it some fine day* (repeat and fade) and I’d rather sing along (repeat and fade) than be inspired at the moment … zzz …

My drowsiness does not seem to understand Robert Frost’s words: ” … and miles to go before I sleep …” I know he was talking about death, morbid spirit that he was, but I’ve got a full day today and naptime doesn’t seem to understand that. I’m dressed up, I’m ready to teach, and — zzzzz …

I am falling asleep sitting up. Sitting up. It’s a good thing I can’t sleep standing up, otherwise class today could be very … different. Zzzzz …

I’ve had two cups of coffee. By cups, I mean 12 ounces, or about 2x the amount in those styrofoam shot glasses they call a coffee cup. This means that I’ve had a total of a pint and a half of — zzzzz …

Can I sleepwalk through work? Not an option — especially since teaching has a touch of acting in it, and I must show my true enthusiasm for this topic externally, which can’t happen if I — Zzzzzz …

It’s okay, I’ll wake up as soon as I have to drive to work. It’s not good sleeping while driving — Zzzzz …

*Waterboys, “The Return of Pan”. Great song.

Hi! Help me understand!

I would like to know who my readers are! Don’t worry; it’s a very short (five minute or less) survey.

I can see where you might not want to tell me who you are if, say, you were my secret admirer or you were a foreign operative who’s investigating my blogs for coded information (I’m talking to you, Russia Bot!) so I will not ask your names. Like all reader surveys, no harm is expected from taking this survey.

The survey can be found here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WSVXHGR

Thank you!

PS: My Valentine to You

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! This includes the Russian Bot, the Portuguese mystery, my daily visitor from Ukraine, the one person my sister knows from Germany, the one person I know from Canada, India and Hong Kong, and the charming girl from Poland who might also be Portugal. Oh, yes, and Peru. How could I forget Peru?

And Happy Valentines Day from my fans in the US, which sometimes even let me know who they are.

In a perfect world, this would be my valentine:

We would all go out to coffee together and meet each other, some of us for the first time. Hugs would be optional, but I would work hard to feel the hugs in the spirit of how they were meant. I would introduce all of you to each other. We would talk about what your favorite coffeeshop beverage was, but because this is Valentine’s Day and not Heaven, I would not be able to indulge you in herb tea or samovar or Turkish coffee. That’s okay, because we are all friends. I would tell you what you mean to me. That would be my valentine.

Isn’t fantasy wonderful?