Quite possibly the best cup of coffee

Back in June when I visited my grandparents in their semi-detached, brick-and-mortar home in England, we went to visit a friend of my dad’s from high school who is a painter—not houses and walls, but portraits of people.

I have vague memories of visiting him and his young family with my parents and brothers couple years ago when I was about twelve or thirteen (unfortunately for him and everyone else, this was also the time that the raging adolescent within me was at its prime: I was spotty, uncomfortable, and timid, and probably pitied quite a bit by the well-meaning adults around me), but most of what I can visualize is a lengthy back garden with a rickety steel-and-tarp swing set. I also remember a bathroom at the very top of the staircase with a toilet that faced the door so that, if you were not quite so intentional about hearing the door click shut, it was possible that it could swing open mid-pee, and, might you jump up out of surprise to close the door before whoever standing at the bottom of the stairs had a chance to glance up, it would be very possible for the trousers around your ankles to get twisted between your feet, tripping you up and sending you tumbling straight down the hard wooded staircase, red-faced and trouserless. 

(Perhaps this was an irrational fear.)

But this is beside the point.

The house was white and nicely hidden behind a group of hedges (so well hidden, in fact, that we drove straight past and had to make a 5 point turn in the middle of the road…) And, there was a dog that was small and fat and part Jack Russell Terrier that came out to greet us.

And oh, the house was a wonderfully comforting chaos. The driveway had cars and wellington boots and cricket bats, soccer balls and watering cans. Walking up the front path, through the door, you were faced with a collection of sneakers, school shoes, library books and toy trucks. It felt like a home well lived in.

My dad’s friend welcomed us in and sat us down at the kitchen table surrounded by his own paintings, school portraits of his three children, and the morning’s mail. Out the window I could see the familiar steel swing set in the long back garden.

And then, he made us the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had.

Now, before this day, my coffee consumption had, like most American youth, been reserved for an espresso pumped with chemically flavored syrups, mingling with steamed milk in a cardboard cup. YUM.

look familiar?

But my dad’s friend had a percolator, a strange contraption that uses gravity and boiling water and steam to drip the coffee through a series of tubes and filters (here you can see how it works). And he also had a Pyrex cup full of milk that he sent in microwave for a few minutes.

A percolator

A microwave (in case you were wondering)

He asked if I wanted my coffee with warm milk.

Warm milk and coffee? I had yet to realize that this is quite a common way to take your coffee, and is alternately referred to as café au lait (or, maybe it was olé...?) But at this point in my life this concept was quite foreign, even revolutionary, and, slightly overwhelmed at the choices, I mumbled something that probably sounded like a vague ‘yes’.

Soon enough, once the coffee had percolated (is that even a verb??) and the milk had microwaved, my dad’s friend poured them, coffee first, into a china teacup. A matching saucer and a biscuit were paired with it, and were placed on the table in front of me.

Now, I don’t know if it was the atmosphere— the cozy chaos of the home and talking with another artist about his work—or if the beans were roasted over some celestial flame, but I have never since had quite the experience of drinking coffee as I did on that morning in June. The coffee warm, and the feeling of contentedness even warmer, I had, for the first time in a while, felt like everything was in place.

And it was good.