Coffee and Me

Wednesdays here belong to Coffee and Me*, the book I’m writing one cup at a time. It arrives January 5, 2027.*

Oops!

I left the coffee pot on all night.

Or, more accurately, I forgot to turn it off before I left work.

Either way you spin it, this was not what I wanted to discover in the morning.

At least I didn’t burn down the school.

That’s what I catastrophize about — leaving the coffee pot on and somehow burning down the entire school.

Thankfully, that has never happened.

I switched from a Keurig to a regular coffee maker because I felt like I drank too much coffee with the Keurig. But there’s one advantage to the Keurig:

I never had to worry about turning it off.

So it was back to the kitchen.

The bottom of the pot had a thin layer of black ash. This was what remained of yesterday’s coffee.

Out came the Dawn again.

Lots of suds.

Lots of scraping.

Eventually the ash came off, although the bottom of the pot still has some brown stains, most likely left over from the other times I’ve forgotten to turn it off.

But that’s okay.

The stains give the pot character.

Again, I made sure to rinse everything thoroughly, because sudsy, soapy coffee was still not on the menu.

Then it was back to my cabinet and back to the beans.

This morning I chose my smaller mug, the one with the Japanese woman in the kimono, which I bought from a shop in Little Tokyo.

And today I reversed yesterday’s order.

Coffee first.

Then the creamer.

There wasn’t much creamer left, so I’ll need to stop at the store tomorrow morning. We have plenty of powdered creamer at work, but I hate powdered creamer.

And maybe that’s one of the wonderful things about brewing my own coffee at work.

The stained pot.

The mismatched mugs.

The forgotten filters.

The occasional coffee disaster.

None of it is perfect.

But maybe that’s the point.

What stain have you stopped trying to scrub out?

Here, I made this. My gift to you, for taking the time to read.

Images are from my imagination, generated by AI. Writing is all me.