Small Blessings

"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others."

-Marcus Tullius Cicero

A delightful, rainy morning here at the gateway to the Finger Lakes.

I found myself commenting to a friend that my state of mind emerges from shadow when I am away from the Sunshine State with its crowds, noise, and in-your-face crassness (is there another kind?). But Wyldswood is also Florida, and there's no softer, more beautiful place in our family's little world.

No, maybe it's less that I'm not in Florida than the fact that I'm here nestled in these hills that were a crush when I arrived, but I've grown to love over, what, nearly five years since the pandemic drifted us up here? Perhaps both. We are a mystery to ourselves, aren't we?

Or perhaps this morning's lifted spirits are buoyed by the fact that the beloved espresso maker arrives resurrected from the dead here at the end of Easter season.

The morning of my first final in my LLM program, maybe two weeks ago now, the Lucca mysteriously started only delivering a one second shot of hot water into the portafilter (otherwise known by your author as the "thingie the coffee comes out of"). I figured the boiler had quit because the needle just jiggled a little before the stream stopped.

Issac and Olivia gave us that machine during the depths of the pandemic, one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for us. Every morning we're here and Peg's working, I scramble down in the darkness to get the boiler heating so she has a wonderful latte in her hand as she shuffles into the darkness to drive to work.

With the espresso machine on the fritz, I was forced to retrieve the old one out of our basement, which was all we had in the early days of the pandemic up at the Sinclaire House apartment.

She tries, but the espresso is bitter and lukewarm, and I'm always forced to finish it in the microwave, where the froth boils over and makes a huge mess. And Peg's curled expression at the first sip tells the tale regarding her appraisal of the end product.

We had about resigned ourselves to hot tea from here on out, when I reached out to Clive Coffee, the company that sold Issac the Lucca, in search of troubleshooting advice. Clive's based out of Portland, Free America, and when you contact customer service you get a knowledgeable equipment technician, in this case a woman named Deb. Having recently gone through technology hell with someone from India claiming to be HP customer support who was instead, apparently, trying to install some sort of ransomware on my laptop (another tale for another time), this personal service from a person who actually worked for the company that sold the very expensive machine was a blessing.

[I struggled to tell that side-story in a way that didn't seem racist, but the experience of dealing with a south Asian customer service rep with a fake name like "George" when you know it's really Shankar is just so universal in our time. My beef isn't ethnic; rather, it's that there is no customer service at all, except this low bidder "help" from a script. Anyway, in MAGA America I reckon I shouldn't worry about offending anyone. I just do.]

Wow, that was quite a digression.

So, Deb asked me to take a couple videos of the machine's water flow and pressures with the camera on my phone, which I dutifully did and sent the results back to her.

And this morning . . . voila! The answer, it turned out, was pretty simple. A guest here at Tara had been trying to make himself an espresso while I was away, and had somehow buggered the volumetric settings such that it would only squirt out less than an ounce of water a pull. By the time Peg reached the bottom of the stairs this morning, I was hard at work remedying the problem, and she left on-time with a real cup of Joe.

So that was nice.

Dean and Slane were less impressed, pouting in the dining room over their inability to go outside in the rain.

I don't have the heart to tell them the new condo has no balcony, sits at the top of a long stairwell that leads to a front door to the building that requires an opposable thumb to open, and fronts a street far too busy to allow two old bachelor cats to roam the yard as they do here at Tara.