Sunday whirl brought to you by Starbucks.

Not that Chloe and I don’t have enough Starbucks around here, we drove the seven minutes away to our old hood to hang out at the Sbux up there to have the very same Earl Gray tea I can make here at home for the price of a tea bag, which is much less than the $2 Sbux price. What’s that all about? And then we watched the lovely people stop by to get their own drinks for 17 times the price of the home brewed.

I was reading the Sunday whirl words and thinking that we’ve all got an addiction to coffee shops, to coffee, a psychosis, and so I let the whirl spiral right down into the dark roasted bitterness of it all.

buckle, gain, miss, instant, navigate, grace
visions, humming, drill, dignity, years, stride

Coffee is really a dominant force in her life right now. It has been for years. It’s a sad thing, but there it is. She takes it in her stride… it’s a city thing.

She likes to stop for coffee on her way, pay her money and hand over a crisp, white Styrofoam cup. She likes the way it looks. The boy behind the coffee bar looks up and smiles; he knows the drill.

Sometimes she has a latte, sometimes an Americano, she never misses a day. She thinks about that time, thousands of years from now, when she and this country will be known for the things left for future generations: Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles; things which may buckle with age but not decay. She is holding in her hand molecules which will outlive her body. Thousands of years of existence for an afternoon coffee finished in ten minutes…in an instant.

No, it can never be instant. That was left behind a long time ago along with her memories of her mother, fat and nervous. How her hands shook as she pulled the wet linens out of the washing machine.
She snapped the sheet open, folded it and put it in the laundry basket, wet, folded, but wet.
Washer woman, lacking grace or dignity, navigating children and chickens, humming her way down the clothesline in the yard.

She blinks away the frown. She smiles at the Styrofoam cups covering every square foot of her living room, each an organic reminder of the day before. She looks at the clean white order of her days.
Someday urban archaeologists will excavate her home and find a large cache of these things, lovingly organised and ready for study. Oh what a gain for science, how glorious that will be.

She picks up the magic marker and writes 09,10,2013 (thought of mom)
She walks over to the window ledge positioning it carefully next to 09,09,2013 (bought new cups)