Glorious Kenya Githima

My friend Liz gave me a quarter pound of Kenya Githima coffee from Stumptown Coffee Roasters in New York.  Her friend works there in some managerial capacity.  She described the friend as tall, British, and garbed in pinstripes and a fedora.  She described the espresso as tasting of unicorns.

You heard it here:  Stumptown Coffee Roasters serves unicorn-flavored espresso.  I can’t verify that personally, but my source is reliable.

The Kenya Githima, grown in (Gachurio, Karantina, Nyeri) Africa is described thus on the included tag:  This well-composed cup leads with ripe cherry and currant aromatics as it transitions to a profile of kumquat, raspberry and grapefruit flavors balanced by brown sugar sweetness.

Some might say just ’fruity.’  Yet the shades of flavor are a little more complex.  I know this because I’m drinking it right now.  Mushing all these glorious tastes into one bland adjective would be a shame.  It has low acidity too; this coffee’s ‘bite’ is in the flavor, not the corrosion of my teeth and esophagus.  If the beans I have from Stumptown (which are at least two weeks old and past their flavor peak) are this good, imagine the espresso, freshly pulled, in all its unicorn-flavored goodness.

What bliss.

I will be making serious efforts to get to this place called Stumptown.  And maybe see New York, if there’s time.

“Winter on the Isle of Sci is windy, cold and wet. The days are dark and short, the nights dark and everlasting. The land is battered by fierce northern winds, which blast icy rain and snow by day, and gust through the roof thatch by night. The sun rises low–if it rises at all–and hovers close to the horizon, barely skirting the hilltops before losing heart and sinking once more into the icy abyss of night.”
~ Stephen Lawhead, The Paradise War

Winter is a dark time. Things get cold. I don’t mean just the weather, but that is a good place to begin. My husband is one of those rare individuals who doesn’t vehemently despise the icy abyss we call Wisconsin in winter, not only enduring but being warm despite it.

“One thing I like about winter,” he says every so often, “Is how good it feels to warm up after coming in from the cold.”
He describes stepping into a warm room, shrugging off a winter coat, then sipping hot chocolate or coffee. The clinging chill streams off clothes and skin until cold itself is just a memory. Perhaps there will be gingerbread cookies to share, or something equally delicious and seasonal, and a tree in the corner shimmering with tinsel and ornaments.

Regardless of tradition, I am often struck by the absurdness of winter decorations. Red glass balls hang everywhere to no practical end. Blinking lights and brass bells add their noise to what we see and hear already. Oversized socks no one except the Abominable Snowman could wear are tacked on the wall or the mantle. We bend pieces of evergreen into circle patterns and hang them on the doors, on cars, anything with a flat surface. We sing a lot (or some people do) about how happy life is…when obviously it’s not.

Our clothes are perpetually dampened and frozen to our bodies. Car windows freeze, forcing us to open the car door at the drive-thru; snowfall ruins the upholstery. Ice on the roads turns vehicles into heavy toboggans and the term ‘bumper cars’ takes on poignant meaning. Some of us leave home when it’s dark and the daylight has come and gone by the time we return, like the sun just gave up after Halloween. We’re vitamin deficient and downtrodden. Stepping outdoors may be gambling with one’s life, or at least bones if one slips on the icy walk and suffers an unfortunate fall. It’s too dangerous to go outside–or too inconvenient–and the grocery supply dwindles with our reluctance to venture out. Now we’re all of the above, and starving (or else, learning there are one hundred ways to prepare rice, and that expired milk doesn’t actually kill you when consumed after the expiration date).

I find myself lingering at the window by my front door, craning my head to see as much as possible through the narrow pane. I can just see the evergreens clustered at the far side of the parking lot. Their branches are iced with thick, deathly white, but life endures beneath, the color of the forest. My breath catches when I see it. If I venture outside and brush the snow away, if I put my face close to the glossed needles, I will smell it: Sharp pine, ever living when other life fails. Soon enough, the snow will be gone, the sun will return. I will see green again.

Then I realize why we hang green on our doors, and place bright colors–pieces of the life we can’t see anymore–around us. We are reminding ourselves that all is not lost.  We make these efforts and more to rise above the despair that winter throws upon us. This is how tradition is made, reminding us of a time when we were, for a moment, warm.

Some gestures extend through time out of mind and some are new, just found perhaps in recent weeks. In dark times we put up lights and bright things to give ourselves hope of what we do not see. Sometimes those things become milestones: Beacons lining the road to remind us we’ve come through this season before, and we will again.

Lights, vivid ornaments, hot chocolate–these stand for nothing in themselves. A blanket is only a blanket. Fire is only a release of wood’s energy. It is how we utilize these things that gives them value.

There once was a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy’s stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws, the effect was charming.

I don’t know how I came to regard this book with such a sense of wonder. Perhaps because I’m the type who doesn’t just read stories–I live them. Perhaps this one had just enough fiction in its reality, with a rabbit who is alive inside of his cotton-stuffed skin, and a decent sense of wonder himself, that I recognized a kindred soul on the pages.
My world was huge, inside my mind, even at six and seven years old. I coasted through dry summer days in Nevada’s desert, braving the sage-flavored wind and dust devils like all the other kids. I watched eagerly with my brothers for the first snow to fall, hands pressed against the foggy pane of the living room window and leaving smudges that obscured the view. Unlike the other kids, I paid little attention to who was doing what, escaping with a book whenever I could. When no escape was available, my imagination would fend for itself.

Epic adventures played out across the evergreen landscape of my mind, things I never bothered to write down or tell others about any more than one would note brushing their teeth or drinking water when they got thirsty.

“What is Real?” the Rabbit asks his friend, the Skin Horse.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” The Skin Horse tells him.“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

The Rabbit wished that he could become Real without these uncomfortable things happening to him.

Being bigger on the inside, and staying that way, is a rare quality. It’s a constant struggle. Becoming Real is so painful, many of us turn into make-believe. We call it survival. Things happen, that you remember dimly without much color, because you manage to stay out of trouble. Escape pain and poverty and loss as best you can. Sit in offices. Play the stock market. Develop ulcers. This is no way to live. I would rather end up shabby and much-loved, carved deep with pain so that joy can fill me just as deeply.

And once…the Rabbit was left out on the lawn until long after dusk, and Nana had to come and look for him with the candle because the Boy couldn’t go to sleep unless he was there…

“You must have your old Bunny!” she said. “Fancy all that fuss for a toy!”

The Boy sat up in bed and stretched out his hands. “Give me my Bunny!” he said. “You mustn’t say that. He isn’t a toy. He’s Real!”

When the little Rabbit heard that, he was happy…and so much love stirred in his little sawdust heart that it almost burst. And into his boot-button eyes, that had long ago lost their polish, there came a look of wisdom and beauty, so that even Nana noticed it the next morning when she picked him up, and said, “I declare if that old Bunny hasn’t got quite a knowing expression!”

There’s a lot to be said for storybook wisdom. Real is worth it.