Coffee & Trains

I really wanted to lounge in bed this morning. Last night I cycled between wakeful anxious thoughts & sleep-like anxious dreams. I know nothing of rosy fingers, but Dawn's bright halo kept poking into my bedroom window long before I was ready to unlace my eyelashes. You, see I might not graduate on time. But that's another story.

This story is about coffee and trains, key aspects of my new town, and wanting to stay in bed to enjoy them. My whole life I have lived near the misdescriptive whistle of a train. (I've heard the old steam train engines, and they really do whistle! But electro-diesel engines have blaring klaxons. Their calls twist in the air, becoming a lonesome cry in the night. Trains passing in the darkest hours howl sad duets, homage to Doppler and the mysteries of science.) The Tuscan Retreat (my last home) didn't really catch the Union Pacific Melody Makers, not like The New Place.

Here, it's all trains - all the time, if you pause to listen for them.

The same is true, oddly enough, with coffee.

Sure, everyone thinks of Seattle as the Left Coast BeanTown (of a very different nature), Coffee's Capital. However, the denizens of Saint Crisco are partial to their bean squeezings too, and San Francisco is a dark drip town. Few dripperies roast their own coffee, and in a city where it's tough to find a home with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a parking spot for under a million dollars, not a lot of real estate is dedicated to the roasting of the beans. Thus the little tan berries are crisped to a brilliant ebony sheen elsewhere.

In fact, many of the smaller roasters are within blocks of The New Place. I'd forgotten this until a funny smell wafted through the window. Familiar, haunting, it took a few minutes to recognize the scent of industrial coffee roasting. Once identified, I continued happily sniffing, absorbing the scent. If memory serves, and the wind is blowing the right direction, you can smell coffee on the air at all hours here.

I cracked my eyelid open a thin slit, hopelessly intending to keep out the radiance of full blown morning. 7:00 am. Way too early to be awake. And yet, there it was. Princess Tasha, the sweetest little cat ever, had dropped a cat bomb of grievous destruction. Try as I might there was no enjoyment to be had within a fifty-foot radius of the cat box. I had to get up and go downstairs, fleeing the toxic air.

Happily it's been a bright blue and green morning. One on which, if I had to get up for, was one to enjoy.