#millscoffee

my grandmother used to wake up at 4:30, so she could ease into the day, sip her first cup uninterrupted.  the first thing she did was prepare a pot of coffee.  never a  cup or 16-oz but a full pot.

i used to hear her walking around the kitchen – cups clinking against each other in the cupboard followed by a ceramic on tile,  water brewing, the sizzle of hot coffee hitting the cold glass bowl.

my grandmother got irritated if i came down too early.  she needed to be one cup in.  if i came down too early, i had to sit there in silence.  i generally waited upstairs for a good 15-20 minutes after the first pot finished brewing.  i waited in bed and listened.  in my mind, i could my grandmother sitting at the table in her plaid robe and sheepskin slippers, sipping her coffee out of the little white cup she always used. 6-oz.  it was a 6-oz cup v-shaped cup in dull white ceramic.  it was her cup.

my anxiety grew as minutes ticked away.  coffee was calling.  minutes that passed were minutes i could restore.  i had to beat my mother down in the mornings or it would all be ruined.  from the time i was 5, i liked to spend the early morning with my grandmother.

by 5 am, i was downstairs and the second pot was brewing (we are a pot-per-person family, a fresh pot kind of family).   my grandmother and i would sit at the kitchen table sipping our coffee in the dim, pre-dawn light she permitted.  she would tell me about her childhood, her parents (my great-grandparents), my grandfather, mother, long gone family pets.  as years past, she often told me the same stories.  i was never sure if she forgot that she had told me or if she simply liked to remember – they tended to appear seasonally.  i took them in as new each time.

on sunday mornings, we broke routine.  rather than sit at the kitchen table, we would go into her room and watch “style with elsa klensch”.  it was a half-hour show.  i always thought elsa was british.  she is not, she is australian.

after the show, she would resume tell me the stories or begin envisioning the magic she could work on her sewing machine.  all this between sips of miked and sugared coffee in a dim, pre-dawn kitchen.  she didn’t like bright lights in the morning.  they were like gulps and she, we preferred to sip our day into existence. to sip our lives up to the present, to sip our visions into reality.

people say i am too young to remember but i know they are wrong. i’ll never forget the first time i saw that deep brown molten silk gracefully pierce the white of the milk below, creating a marvelously caramel-colored swirl in the bottom of my white cup. my cup – my first unforgettable cup of liquid bliss. i remember holding the bottom half of the cup in my palm; remember the heat warming my hands and the aromatic steam encircling my face – at that moment, there was nothing in the world that could have been more magical and more real. it was like i had my own string that kept me tethered to the earth while i flew high above, on my bitter, caramel-colored cup of love. i was 5, maybe 5.5 and i, in my childhood mind, had just been ushered into the world of adulthood. screw the adult dinner table, i had 6 steaming oz of coffee and a seat at the table for afternoon coffee. i can’t remember what my grandmother and mother were speaking about, i have no idea what time of year it was – except that it was not summer, but i’ll never forget the sensation of having come of age. i wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, that i was now qualified for but i didn’t care. i was prepared to fake it until i figured it out.  

in our house, it seemed that every important conversation happened over coffee and coffee conversations had unspoken roles: 1) what was said over coffee, stayed over coffee and 2) rule #1 could be broken if you were sharing over a different cup of coffee (as long as the identity of the original source was concealed). At that stage in life, #2 was particularly tricky because i only knew two people that would let me have coffee with them.

three decades later, i still feel a slight twinge of excitement as i sit down for coffee with someone for the first time, knowing that i am just a few ounces away from stepping through a door into someone else’s world. to me, coffee isn’t just a drink, it’s a way of connecting my life with our world.