"Daybreak"

Gypsy and I were sitting on the cabin porch at daybreak. The humidity from Dolly was dripping off the metal cabin roof on to the toe of my deerskin topsiders and into my whip cream laced espresso Vashon Island coffee. The air was cool and the wind out of the south west caressed us with its gentle presence. This is the kind of morning we revel in, just being together in the moments it is occuring is the whipped cream on my strawberry shortcake. By now you know I am addicted to strawberry shortcake, particularly the whipped cream. When the kids were little I use to spray the whipped cream up and down their arms and over each finger. It looked like snow. We then devoured it from our sticky arms and hands laughing it away, sweet memories of days long gone. These are the mornings memories come with the breeze filling our being with the past events that have stayed in place for us to relive. The woods stays quiet giving us this time. These days of our lives we see in colored prints we took with our camera. Everyone remains somewhere in our mind and just needs a morning on the cabin porch to be remembered. I never took a picture that is not still in my film archive, waiting. A record of my life held for me until the woods and the wind clear my thoughts and the pictures appear, like a photo album relinqishing times and places to fill the pages I write. I still see the bushes that grew across the front of my families house in the small Ohio town where I grew up. We use to play hide and go seek, and I hid behind them. There was stucco from the white wood of the house for about three feet to the ground. There was a basement window there as well. It might be the window where the coal shoot was placed to deliver the black, dusty coal for our furnace. One nice thing about coal was the steady heat, no clicking on and off. When I was sick with asthma my dad would hold me on his lap over the downstairs register to keep us warm. See what I mean, can you see the pictures in this childs mind? The photos never go away and will live in the pages I have written when I am long gone. But until then Gypsy and I will return to the cabin porch at daybreak and wait, trying to justify our second island cup of espresso. The picture of the 100 year old island coffee roasterie, home of The Wet Whisker, lingers in my thoughts reminding me of the generations of coffee lovers. My ancestors in Schaffhausen, Switzerland liked to linger over their morning coffee. Son Daniel and I do as well. Your island coffee is on its way.