Closing this Coffee Chapter

Old Judge Coffee

Rising gingerly from his wooden rocker, the old man clumped across the wooden plank flooring of the front room, stroking and digging at the small of his back beneath the faded blue flannel shirt.  Must have slept crooked last night.  He continued to gouge his strong fingers into the ache buried deep within his frame.

The kitchen was in its usual untidy array of coffee mugs, cups & saucers, stoneware bowls and scattered appliances.  Reaching for the percolator, he began to refill his mug with his preferred refried coffee.  It was a return to simplicity.  The old man didn’t even drink coffee until his preacher days in college, didn’t even learn to use a percolator until he was thirty, bought his first Mr. Coffee at thirty-three, graduated to the cafe-style Bunn coffee brewer at forty, and began grinding beans five years after that.  And now, at seventy-two, he was drinking Old Judge out of a stove-top percolator, sometimes boiling a handful of coffee grounds with broken egg shells in a kettle not once, but twice, stirring, and drinking refried coffee.  He did this to savor the memory of his earlier days camping in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. . .

Tags: Old Judge Coffee, still life