The Coffee Machine Breakup

It is officially over — for now

The relationship did not even last four full months. Relative to the many decades I’ve been opening my eyes every morning the relationship was just a teeny tiny blip on the radar of my lifetime. Gone as fast and suddenly as it began. It ended yesterday.

I wrote about the beginning of this relationship in some article. I went into my stories to find it but, goodness gracious, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack in there. Apparently, I did not mention the beginning of the relationship in the title of the story.

That’s okay. I didn’t have the patience to search for more than a minute and a half so I will have to trust my memory. The problem with that is that sometimes I forget… and other times I just don’t remember. So it is possible that I may be making some of this up.

The relationship began on a cold day in November. I think. I remember it was cold and I remember that at some point in my day I smelled coffee. The smell somehow followed me home and it was in my kitchen that I abruptly had a full-blown hankering.

Don’t you just love that word? ‘Hankering’ is one of my favorite words in the American language. It is so joyous. Hankerings are experienced by all humans. We all get them, yet surprisingly there are no classes dealing with hankering being taught in our public school system. Why is that?

Hankerings come in all different sizes, shapes, colors, textures, and levels of intensity. Our conditioned reactions to these hankerings are as widely varied as the hankerings. Hankerology is a complex subject requiring years of study. But I’m not an expert. All I know is that I get them all the time.

And I do know that some hankerings come with such a profound intensity that they always lead to compulsive action.

I gave up drinking coffee way back in the early 1990s. Don’t ask me what year. I don’t remember. In over a quarter of a century of not drinking coffee I still get low-level hankerings for coffee — especially when I smell it. These hankerings are fleeting and almost never result in drinking coffee.

Okay, once or twice or maybe three times a year I would succumb to these hankerings and buy myself a cup of coffee somewhere. Usually I can only drink about half a cup. That is all I can take.

The hankering I got on that cold day in November measured 9.4 on the Richter Scale. It was huge!

I remembered that I own a coffee maker which I purchased after the last major hankering back in 2010 (or was it 2009?). I dug the coffee maker out from the back of a kitchen cabinet, scrubbed it clean then set it on my kitchen counter. I then went into the fridge and dug out a package of coffee from the very, very back. Looking at the package I realized that the coffee had expired back in 2012. So I emptied the coffee into my compost bucket and guiltily threw the packaging in the trash. Then I got re-bundled and went out to buy some coffee.

And that is when the relationship began. For almost four months that coffee maker has been sitting on my tiny kitchen counter. I didn’t revert to being a daily coffee drinker, though. Since then I’ve made perhaps two or three pots of coffee a week — always in the afternoon. I can’t imagine drinking coffee in the morning. That’s just gross.

So anyway, back on that cold day in November I entered into a relationship with coffee. As in all relationships there were sacrifices to be made. For me, the biggest sacrifice was giving up that six inch by nine inch space of my tiny kitchen counter for the darn coffee maker. I couldn’t afford to give up that much counter space but I did for the sake of my tentative and exploratory relationship.

But the relationship was doomed. I just didn’t give it my all. My heart wasn’t in it. I knew that I would soon have to break it off. The magic had totally worn off.

So yesterday on a cold and snowy day in February I broke up with coffee. I scrubbed clean the coffee maker and put it back into hidden depths of cabinetry. I looked at the package of coffee I had on hand. It looked like I had enough coffee for two more pot’s worth. The expiration date was August of 2022. I hoped I wouldn’t end up throwing it out.

My kitchen looks so much bigger now with that extra bit of counter space.

It was a peaceful break-up. No yelling or fighting or screaming or fists rammed through walls. None of that stuff. Just a little bit of cleaning up. We’re still friends. But the intimate relationship is over.

I’m sure there will be hankerings in the future. It would take one hell of a mega-hankering to elicit any response from me, though. I prefer to remain single.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved. Writings of White Feather Archive

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