Today I celebrate the most important tool in my world right now. My Hamilton Beach drip coffee maker. It is what is saving me this week ( I know, it’s only Tuesday.)

But someone in the house had a cold last week and I have seemed to have caught it. (Really, only a cold, his COVID test was negative.) I got tested yesterday, just in case, but pretty sure it’s just a cold. 

But I digress. Coffee. That is what the topic is today, the nectar of the gods. The thing about coffee is that it’s changed so much over the years. Back when I was a child, people, like neighbors, would knock on the the door, and as everyone sat at the kitchen table, my mom or dad would put the stove on under the giant percolator. Coffee came in pots. Not individual servings, like Starbucks, or Nespresso, or K-Cups. One big pot and you could decide how much sugar or cream you wanted. The shared pot was the thing. We had two stove top coffee pots, a small one and a large one. I really don’t remember the small one being used much, but the big one was full all day, and when it was emptied, we made more. 

Maybe the world was less busy then. I know my dad worked full time, and my mom, while not working a full time job, usually had some kind of business running out of our house. (A ceramic studio in the basement a couple years, a clothing shop behind the kitchen one year, just whatever her latest obsession was.) But I don’t remember anyone planning to come over, they just showed up. And we heated up the coffee. If children came along, we were expected to drop what we were doing and entertain (play with) them. And they would usually stay until the pot was empty. That’s how they knew when it was time to go. You can’t tell time with a pour over, you know?

IHOP has it right. If you order coffee there, you get the whole pot right there on the end of the table. In a fiction thing I am playing with, it’s one of the characters favorite place to get coffee and read. They put the pot on the table and leave her alone. She tips well, considering it rent for the few hours she is occupying the table. 

I guess what I am wondering is that would we be so divided if we were all drinking the same pot of coffee?