There’s No Place Like Home

Adair stares into the fresh cinnamon roll cupped in her delicate hands.

Adair’s father stares into his, cupped in his grizzled, weathered hands.

Both read the tea leaves.

The tea leaves, but they drink coffee.

Adair’s mother, awake before the others, began to percolate coffee, the old-fashioned, beautiful way. She did so as she began the cinnamon rolls. You can’t have a cinnamon roll in the early morning without a “cup o’ jo”.

The “pot” is nothing fancy– it might be steel, it might be tin. Whichever, it dents easily. But then again, the “pot” is elaborate. Inside the “pot” proper, is a kind of pedestal, supporting a “pot within a pot”, which is perforated. It is into this secondary pot the coffee– the ground coffee beans, go– to undergo the percolation process.

The “pot” has a cap, which can be taken on and off. In order to put the perforated secondary “pot” and pedestal into the primary “pot” this cap, or top, must be removed.

Here is one of the cunningest features of “pot” and cap: the cap has a hole right in the center, wherein can be, and must be, fitted a beautiful piece of glass.

Whoever designed that little glass piece at the top of the percolating coffee “pot” was a genius. I’d like to meet them. In itself, it is as beautiful a piece of art work as can be imagined. You see, when the coffee percolates, it is in this beautiful piece of glass we are allowed to see the percolation is a happy melody, in tune with the morning, the morning of a grand new day. Epoch.

Imagine the loving care required to put that little window into the world of coffee at the top of a coffee “pot”, rather cheaply constructed, but I say shrewdly constructed.