The mornings coffee is important. I’m not a conesoir of premium coffee blends. I can remember my parents drinking Maxwell House...”good to the last drop”. And we had some Sanka sitting around getting stale for several years. They never brewed coffee.....it was always instant.
Today’s blend is one of the cheapest I could find. A medium dark 100% Columbian Arabica bean my local grocery chain sells for $3.99/ 11 oz. can. My vintage Farberware stainless steel percolator puts the Keurig machine to shame with quality. After all it does say “super fast and automatic” on the side. I don’t see the point in spending more on top shelf brands but then again, I don’t drink them to know any better. I do know that after being outside in some sporting pursuit on a cold day or chopping wood in a snow cover lot in January.....any brand of coffee tastes premium.
What I use to drink coffee out of is probably as important as the coffee itself. My go to mug recently is a sea foam blue Fiesta ware made in West Virginia. A mug has to be simple, fit the hand and hold more than a cup of coffee. And somehow the mug imparts a flavor to the coffee. I can’t tell you how that happens any more than I can explain the magic of Christmas to a child but it seems to me about the same thing.
I recently purged my cupboard of mugs that I didn’t like. They fit my hand poorly, had a faded out picture of somebody from decades ago, advertised a company I didn’t really care about or worst of all....said “Made in China”. I just picture a bunch of lead leaching into my morning contemplative brew.
But this morning I felt adventurous. I opted for one of my pure white Pfalzgraff dinner coffee cups. It has a simple pattern to it that reminds me of melting candle wax and the handle is a joy to grip. But what I had in mind was the color contrast that the coffee created sitting patiently in my white mug waiting to be consumed. I believe it is certainly going to be good to the last drop.
The first real snow accumulation is scheduled to be 9-18 inches starting tonight. It got me to thinking I need to go get some water and stockpile it for an electrical outage. Which reminded me of how proud I was to be self sufficient in the past. I believe self sufficiency and simplicity are members of the same family. However, I was never as self sufficient as I dreamed. And nobody really is. We rely on so many others to provide opportunity to help ourselves. Partnering is something we do almost without thinking and attribute our good fortune to self sufficiency.
Sure I used to fell, cut, Hull and stack wood for the fireplace but that required a parcel of property often owned by someone else, a chainsaw someone else built, a truck Ford made, a stove made by someone else.....it goes on and on for every act of self sufficiency there seems to be a supporting partner. Even loners like Dick Proenneke of Alaska or the few families that live in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge rely on bush pilots to bring in supplies. Self sufficiency has always been semi-self sufficiency. It is only a matter of degrees.
Simplicity makes self sufficiency a more reasonable description of your lifestyle. It allows you to rely more on yourself than the other partner. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we strive to have simpler lifestyles. Perhaps there is always a reason to have a way to continue on without community even though we are so connected. Is the will to survive driving our simplicity? Somehow our instincts know that unchecked consumption and accumulation weighs us down, slows us down and interferes with our very ability to survive. It may simply just decay our quality of living. Or it may cause us to be unhappy with life altogether because we see no satisfaction in all we gather and maintain.
It’s a pure white coffee mug type of day to match the pure white snow coming down. Time to set up the bird feeders. I think I hear some chickadees talking outside my window.