Pepper in My Coffee

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Look what the Dirty-Dish Fairy brought me

It’s sunny and cold this morning. Sunflower seeds dangle off the deck in a feeder that’s supposed to be squirrel-proof but isn’t quite.  One cardinal and a group of chickadees peck at it with enough gusto to keep it turning like a carousel.

The dirty-dish fairy visited me in the night, as he often does now that my adult children have moved back home to live.  God bless their little cotton socks.

After my first dishwasher-load of the day, I’ve got my coffee and Pandora going.  Love me some Pandora.  It’s a Leon Redbone kind of day today.

Starr, aka, Lizzie Borden

The coffee is thick, black, sweet, and spicy, just the way I like it, and I’m having it in the company of Scout and Starr, my daily household companions.  I’m the only coffee drinker in the house.

Scout the Wonder Dog

My best coffee companion was my mother.  She taught me to like it by the time I turned three.  Yes.  I guess now that would raise some eyebrows.  But I don’t think it’s done me any harm and it’s certainly brought me many happy memories of time with Mama.

Of course she didn’t just pour me a big, hot mug of Red Diamond and tell me to have at it.  No. 

In the mornings, in the farmhouse we lived in when I was tiny, our family started the day with a cooked breakfast—eggs, sausage, biscuits, jelly or preserves—and there was a great bustle as my brother and sisters ate and ran for the county bus that took them to the local high school. My father would have been out and gone for some time by then.

That left just Mama and me.  When the door slammed behind the last departing teenager, Mama tidied the table and sank the dishes into the sudsy pan. Then she got a cup and saucer out of the cupboard and poured a thimbleful of coffee in, filling the rest of the space with milk.  She brought it to me with a spoon and a warning to, “blow on it a bit before you drink it, baby, it’s still a little hot.”

If I close my eyes, I can still see how slim her hands and arms were then, and graceful. How the giving loosened her normally composed expression into the play of a smile around her lips and eyes.

After she poured herself another cup, thick and sweet and black, she sat down next to my high chair, admonishing me to eat “just another tee-niney bite more,” or asking me if I remembered to put on my underwear that morning. 

Yes, I was that young. Sometimes I forgot.  Besides, I hated underwear.  Also socks. And shoes.

But I loved, LOVED, my Mama.  And I felt like I shared the Queenship of the World with her when she sat that little cup and saucer next to my plate.

To this day, my favorite coffee is percolated.  But most days, being as I’m brewing for only myself, I use a French-press.  I sprinkle a little bit of cinnamon on the grind, and in winter I mill a good bit of black pepper on top before adding the water.

Nothing is as warming in the winter as peppered coffee.  Except for mother-love.

Still hates underwear

Good day to you. Thanks for coming.  Come again soon.


      Leann

Why Mama Clark's?

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Come on in. Make yourself comfortable. Let me tell you about my favorite place. 

In the beginning, it was just a back porch on a little house in a small town in northern Alabama, ringed round with tall trees. But later it became a store, lined floor to ceiling with shelves full of fabrics of all thicknesses and colors and patterns. 

On the bosom-fronted counter was a large brown rack of wooden spools of thread and an upright, bronze-colored cash register.  The numbers in its small windows jumped drunkenly up and down with each pushed button and made bright ringing noises like an old pinball machine.

There were drawers layered with zippers and bias tape and ribbons and interfacing. A large glass cabinet displayed buttons of all colors and sizes, with a bank of thin little drawers of more buttons underneath. There were hanging cards of snaps and hooks and eyes.  There were silvery, slivery needles, pins with heads like shoe-button candy, and fat pincushions that looked like overripe beefsteak tomatoes.

In one sunny corner was a table weighed down with pattern books too heavy for a child to lift; McCall’s and Butterick and Simplicity; circled by soft chairs to rest in while paging through them.  Underneath was a basket full of lace ends, fabric scraps, orphaned buttons, empty spools, and tattered magazines for little ones to play with while their mothers browsed and visited. 

At the back of the room was a curtained opening and through it was a small room with a big window with a sewing machine underneath.  Pieces of pinned work in progress lay across the top, and the tiny pinprick of light from the bulb just over and behind the needle glinted off the presser foot. 

Through another curtain just opposite the first, there was a kitchen decorated all around with a border of fat, faded cherries. On the back eye of the stove was a percolator full of thick, bitter Red Diamond coffee.

A tin of teacakes lived in the top right cupboard over the sink, and doughnuts nestled next to cold biscuits in a cherry-fringed metal breadbox below.

On the top wire shelf of the fat, squat old refrigerator was a half-filled pitcher of iced tea. It was brewed and doctored to the color and sweetness of wild honey and stood in a splendor of coolness.

Time, there, was measured by the movement of the sunlight over the lint-dusted wooden floorboards, whether the second or third cup of coffee had gone cold, whether the ice had melted to water in the glasses, or how much there was left, still, to talk about.

That was Mama Clark’s. At least, how I remember it now. Mama Clark’s Kitchen and Back Porch Emporium, I called it.

That was where my mother bought the goods to make our family’s clothes and curtains and bed coverings in my early childhood in the small hours of the sixties. That was where she brought her happiness and worries and ideas to share. And she brought me, her youngest child.

And I brought my curiosity, imagination and memory. 

Then one day it was gone. The whole world of it, gone.  But wherever I went in the rest of the world, I remembered it. And I decided someday I would have a kitchen and back porch emporium to share, of some kind, one way or another. Finally, here it is.

Welcome. Thanks for coming. Come again soon.