Little Things That I Love

Musings on a December Day

A walk on a cold windy day with sun breaks so sudden they are blinding. Weaving in and out of trees on a trail high above the water and it’s difficult to tell which is colder—being in deep shade but protected from the wind, or being out in the weak December sun, whipped by the wind. Either way, it’s not really that cold. Mid 40s. We can deal with far worse, we humans, even we relatively weak and pampered humans who sleep in climate-controlled homes under bushels of down or wool or silk or other very warm solutions invented by other animals which we took for our very own.

The steam rising from a very hot cup of coffee in a fine stoneware mug. The craftsmanship is visible in the perfect imperfection of the handle, in the line at the bottom of the piece where the glaze stops and raw clay is exposed, in the way that the foot, underneath the pot, has been carved away, or not.

I do not know where this coffee was grown, but once upon a time I was first led, and then I myself led, tours through coffee plantations in the neotropics—in Costa Rica, in Panama, in Ecuador—where we could see what life and agriculture looked like.

In the large farms, the homogenous ones, we saw vast acres of single species, maintained not by hard work and heavy weeding but by aerial application of killers, of all the ‘cides—herbicide and insecticides and fungicides. Certainly those ‘cides wouldn’t dare to direct their cidal nature at us, would they? Those monocrops of coffee grown in full sun which makes them grow faster but not better, for coffee is not a full sun plant when it has a choice…those monocrops they produce more coffee, more and more and more, and that is what we want.