Shade Coffee in Fairhaven

The Pacific NW is known for its coffee consumption. Everyone is carrying around one of those insulated cups that they refill at their favorite coffee shop, which are around every corner. Some have espresso machines at home. Some have cards at coffee shop that get punched or stamped and then free coffee is lavished on them. Part of the coffee explosion here is the gray. It's gray day after day and hard to get jazzed up, so what do you do, drink coffee. Caffeine my drug of choice, one friend said. On the radio once, a Seattle show sang a jingle about coffee being a "good clean pick-me-up in a Christian society".

I drink a couple of cups of coffee a day myself. I usually make my own, but on occasion go out to the coffee shop and write and drink Americanos. When I was in Italy I was laughed at. "Ah, American coffee," they'd say and wink at me. Well, it's good. Not so thick as espresso and doesn't hurt my stomach. Now I drink Shade Grown coffee from small countries. It's the Fair Trade thing where farmers actually get a decent payment for the coffee they grown on good land, not deforested land. I think its swell.

Trader Joe's sells a mix of coffees. They come in cute cans with fancy labels. The one I'm drinking now is from Bolivia. It comes in an orange can and has a donkey on it. I don't grow coffee but once I looked at a coffee plantation with my soon-ex that was situated on the big island right next to David Crosby's place. It was quit steep. We'd never have made good coffee farmers. We argue all the time. We are a nightmare couple. Why pine for something so bad? I pine for good soil. I pine for a thin waist. I pine for long swinging hair. We always pine for what we don't have. We're human. That's all.

Today the grandbaby comes and we'll go to the garden. We'll water and now Mike is planning on planting some beets and other things he's purchasing at Joe's. I'm still stuck on everything having to be raised from seed. I better get with the program. Best in Plants, Flower