Coming Home

There is a pot in my bedroom. A twenty dollar drip brew situation that has never once let me down. Ok, maybe once, we've worked past that. I keep good coffee in it because I am not an animal Italian most days but any well roasted coffee will do. I never leave stale water in the reservoir because we have standards even on the bad days.

The first thing I do when I come home, from anywhere that required something of me, is make coffee.

Not unpack. Not check messages. Not do the inventory of everything that happened and what it means and what comes next. Coffee first. The good Italian kind in the twenty dollar pot that asks nothing of me except that someone remembered to empty it before they left.

I have hazelnut creamer waiting. The sugary chemical kind you cannot get in Europe and that I am not remotely sorry about. Europe has many things. This is not one of them and I miss it every trip.

I put on my fuzzy socks. I wrap myself in my blue cashmere pashmina from Budapest, the one that has been to more countries than most people I know and still smells faintly like the market where I found it. It makes me feel safe in a way I have stopped trying to explain to anyone.

Then I stand in my bedroom and hold the mug with both hands like a toddler.

This is when I stop long enough to notice the carpal tunnel. The warmth works into the ache and if my grip goes, which it does when I'm tired, I don't drop it. Nobody wants to clean that up at whatever hour my body thinks it is after a transatlantic flight.

I do not think about anything important.

I have a theory that the body holds things until it knows it's safe to let go. I came home from this trip carrying more than my carry on and it wasn't until I was standing there in my fuzzy socks with my creamer and my Budapest pashmina that my system finally got the message. You're home. You can put it down now.

Oh grand coffee, you hold me in your warmth like a fine Monet in a Paris heatwave.

It's not complicated. That's the whole point. The traveling version of me can rest now. The home version is back and she knows where the good creamer is.

Jackie