I am a person who is writing about coffee and chocolate milk

All summer, I’ve been brewing coffee before bed and leaving the silver pot in the refrigerator overnight so it’s chilled by morning. 

The sputtering gurgle of the coffee maker and the steamy, earthy smell has come to instill corporeal quiet every evening, late, right before I realize how much I need it.  That coffee scent emerges from the kitchen and pushes its way down the hall.  It finds me wherever I am in the apartment and rests its warm weight on my eyelids.   I lures me back to the kitchen.  I switch off the coffee maker and put the hot coffee pot on the top shelf in the fridge.

By morning, the aroma will be lustless.  Just cold.

It is a ritual based on the weather and my temperature sensitive tongue, but there is something unexpectedly empowering about making my coffee at night.  When I push that button and the red light clicks on, I think, “that’s right, because I said so!”  I’m not just drinking stale-ish, artificially sweetened coffee every morning, I’m choosing to be a person who drinks stale-ish, artificially sweetened coffee every morning.  (And I’m a person who drinks the whole 14-ounce pot.)

I keep the coffee filters in a drawer in the kitchen.  I use my thumb and index finger to peel the top layers off the stack of filters, and then I blow down gently on the edge to separate just one.  Every night, this makes me think of milk money. 

Each student in my kindergarten classroom had a white envelope with a milk carton sketched on the front and their first name and last initial printed on the back.  The letters were drawn with polka dot serifs. 

My teacher, Mrs. Robertson, taught us to puff air across the top of the envelope to open it without risking papercuts on our tender little fingertips.  Every morning, a different pair of buddies got a turn to carry the bin of milk orders to the cafeteria.  At snack time, a lunch lady would return the envelopes, emptied of their change, alongside a crate of petite milk cartons. 

On Fridays, my mom gave me a quarter, a dime and a nickel to drop in my flat paper milk carton and told me to put it in the stack of 2% milk orders.  Some kids ordered milk every day.  Some kids ordered chocolate milk every day.  A lot of kids ordered chocolate milk on Friday.  I ordered milk once a week.  Friday only.  2%.  No chocolate.  Mom said.

Once, though, I blew down across the top of my envelope and dropped in forty cents and then I added my envelope to the stack of chocolate milk orders.  When the lunch lady rolled her cart into our classroom, I plucked a brown and white carton from the plastic crate. 

And I became a kid who drank chocolate milk through a skinny red straw at snack time on Fridays.