Coffee…

Coffee has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, literally.  Not that I drank coffee all the way back…but it was always in the house… it has been a part of everything.

Momma always drank her coffee cold… or maybe more like room temperature, now that cold coffee has a whole new meaning.  She would melt the instant coffee with hot water, just enough to melt it, then add in cold water to fill whatever it was in.  I remember one time that she thought there were pins in the glass that she put her coffee in and that maybe she drank pins.  She didn’t, she found the pin glass later… but it is one memory surrounding coffee.

Genie drank coffee and sometimes postum.  I hated coffee when I was a kid, but I remember that postum was way worse… for some reason.

Coffee always smelled wonderful and I always thought that nothing that smelled that good could possibly taste so bad.

We had coffee on… toast?… soggy with lots of sugar?  I don’t know why I remember that one other than it was one time that I was told that I would someday like coffee…

The last time I was home for Thanksgiving sitting at mom’s table drinking coffee and talking and laughing… and getting sent home with a carafe of coffee and dozens of wicked cool flavored creamers that I froze even after I got them home so I could treasure them for a long time in my coffee and remember the wonderfulness of being with everyone…

But the most vivid memory I have is of sitting on daddy’s knee… the cup was white with blue stripes… it was a heavy cup, not very big… kind of what I think of as diner cups now… it was always instant coffee… the red tea kettle used to heat the water that was destined to melt the crystals… sanka sometimes, but not as often as nescafe or maxwell house…

Once the coffee was nice and black, it was time for the cream… milk… from Nutt’s dairy… The paper lids that sealed the glass bottles always had the COOLEST cardboard stoppers that popped out of the lids and ended up being everywhere… the best milk bottles were the ones with the red or blue plastic carriers.

How is this for a total brain dump?

The milk ended up in a little juice glass… I dumped in the milk and I always remember that there is just the right amount of milk in coffee when it hits the bottom of the cup and swirls back up to the top of the coffee and starts to swirl around.

You really don’t get this kind of “exactly right”-ness from creamer… at least not powdered creamer…. that doesn’t swirl.

I can’t pour cream or creamer into a cup of coffee without that memory coming back and hitting the back of my head.