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An Ode to Coffee
Coffee reminds me of home. Of the mornings I would pad out of my room, sliding my feet through the wooden floors, skipping the stairs and reaching the heavenly aura of the kitchen. Mornings at home mean coffee: the warm, delicious brew that my dad makes every day at dawn. Colombian, Costa Rican, arabica, robusta, any and every kind of coffee bean you could think of. My house is the museum of brown beans, and my cupboard holds the most precious of treasures. And although I’m not an expert, the aroma delights my senses; I need only to sense the distinct atmosphere of the lukewarm energy booster to open my sleepy eyes a little bit wider, and to widen my nostrils to inhale the scent.
If I could write an ode to coffee, my first sentence would be, thank you. Its smell that not only wakes me up, but wakes every house in the neighborhood, in the city, in the state. It safely drives people to their jobs in the early morning, when the sky is still pitch black. It revives the weary students, hopping off the bus at 7 in the morning, hoping to make it on time to their first class. Coffee has saved more lives than Superman has in his lifetime, and maybe I should be thanking the caffeine, but there’s nothing calculated about the magical content that encompasses all that is coffee, for it is not only the caffeine that brings back the dead every waking hour. It has to be magic or witchery, as nothing in my life moves without its power.
Without it, my house is empty, unlived, hollow. Something is missing. The coffee isn’t just water and beans, it’s energy, chakras, a force of nature. It’s what makes each of us wake up at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, even though we could sleep in. The coffee is my dad waking up at seven to set it all up. The coffee is my mother giving him a kiss and thanking him for doing it every morning. The coffee is my brothers fighting to get the last cup in the brewer. It’s me breathing it in when the sun is just rising, and the streetlights are just turning off after a night of duty.
Coffee reminds me of home. But, it also reminds me of life, and love, and moving cars and places. It reminds me of a clock, because without it time wouldn’t pass by, but with it, time just flies by. And minutes ago I wrote that if I could make an ode to coffee I would start off with a thank you, so:
“Thank you.”
