Recently my sister gave me a Bodum® coffee-press travel mug for my birthday. The filter is a little coarser than the one on the full-size coffee press I normally use, and I'm still fine-tuning the grind. This morning I filled the mug just before I left my house for work, pressed the plunger somewhere along my 10-minute commute, and had freshly-brewed coffee ready to drink when I got to the office.
As I was walking back down the hall from the break room where I rinsed out the filter and the mug, I pinched a coffee ground off the tip of my tongue, using the thumb and ring finger of my left hand. That indelicate gesture transported me to the sunny kitchen table of my childhood home on an expanse of rolling wheat fields in the very early 1960s, where my mother sat drinking percolated coffee, smoking cigarettes, and talking to a neighbor lady. I watched her as she lifted one elbow from the sticky plastic tablecloth — but watched isn't the right word. For an instant, I lived through her as she stuck the tip of her tongue between her clenched teeth and pinched a coffee ground — or just as likely a fleck of tobacco — between her thumb and ring finger and flicked it into the big, black and pink-speckled ashtray in the middle of the table.
She's been gone for many years. But just now my mother was here, walking back down the hall to my office, and it was harvest time. Everything is flaxen – the waving wheat fields, the baking sun, her coarse, unkempt hair, even the arabesque of the plastic tablecloth. It's hot out, and as she does that thing with her thumb and ring finger, I wrap myself around her arm and I beg her please, please take us swimming.
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