Coffee

The coffee was not particularly good.

She knew this. She had better coffee at other people's houses, coffee from good machines and good beans and people who understood the process. Her own coffee was average — ground from a supermarket bag, made in a machine she'd had for nine years, drunk from the same chipped mug every morning.

But the ritual was hers.

The alarm at six-forty-five. The stumble to the kitchen. The particular sound of the machine. The three minutes of waiting while the light through the kitchen window did its slow thing with the day.

She had understood something in the second year after her husband died: you could either make the rituals meaningful or let them be taken from you by grief. She had chosen, without making a big decision of it, to keep the rituals. To make the coffee every morning. To drink it at the window. To look at the morning.

It was not in the coffee. The coffee was average. It was in the fact of the doing — the maintenance of ordinary life as an act of love for the life itself. The stubborn continuation of small, good habits in the absence of the person who used to make coffee too.

Nine years later, the machine was old and she still drank from the chipped mug.

Some mornings she made two cups out of habit and then didn't.

Some mornings she just made one.

Either way she stood at the window. Either way the light came.