Coffee Log, Day 124

Hi.

Coffee: Fair Trade Ethiopian Medium Dark, Harris Teeter Brand

I saw graves in Pittsboro. The sun had gotten behind a cloud. NPR was running a story about an NFL player turned activist. Lunch was over. It had ended a while ago for the grave-dwellers.

What gets preserved…

In the late nineties, my parents built an annex. My mother’s father was dead; my grandmother needed somewhere less familiar to live. I watched the construction. The blond wood, the wet foundation. I practiced taekwondo routines when the workers weren’t around. The skeleton boards were Hong Kong.

Eventually, the annex was a home; then it was a grave when cancer got her; then it was storage. It was storage for a long time. Fifteen years – spiders replaced by other spiders – in 2013 life went south for me, I moved back home. I remember clearing the boxes. I made a new space in the annex and lived there two years in my early twenties.

In the end, though, when the centuries strip America, her blond particle boards will decay. In the luckier places, the foundation might stick.

Maybe you’ll see my footprints punching ghosts.

Currently Reading:

History of Wolves, Emily Fridlund (2017 Man Booker Prize Shortlist)

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN

“We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And someday we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.” – Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451