Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Monday, September 29, 2008

Wretched Retching

All right, it's true I used to be prodded when I was young and pregnant, by the smell of wafting coffee, to throw up. Why coffee? Dunno. Up until my pregnancy we used to share very pleasant breakfasts, with coffee our beverage of choice. We were kids, I mean we really were. Married at age eighteen, both of us, we suddenly became very grown-up and did grown-up things together.

The descriptive narrative here will focus solely on the beverage we shared during our breakfasts, before rushing off to our respective places of work. Everything went along very nicely, as we settled in to married life. We had managed to buy a nondescript little bungalow for let's see - $12,900 and believe me at that price we overpaid. I won't get into the shabby construction and lack of insulation.

This is all about coffee. I wonder how many people know that coffee was really celebrated as a wonder drink, so much so that music composers of the 17th Century dedicated superb masterpieces they'd written to that elixir? In any event, we had coffee with our breakfasts, tea with our evening meal, one of our little established rituals of adulthood and marriage.

Until, as I say, that first pregnancy when suddenly so many things we took for granted as normal food and drink had me reacting rather violently as my body, busy with other things, would have no part of them. Coffee was one of those items that brought me to misery. The smell of what formerly was a delicious wake-up call to the day, now brought me to my knees in front of our trusty toilet.

Funny thing is, I never, ever lost my visceral distaste for coffee, leaving me to wonder if I ever did really enjoy it, even when I consumed it prior to pregnancy. Was a time when our children began their teen years and were permitted to drink coffee along with their father. We'd go for country picnics and a primitive brewing method for coffee remained a vital part of the afternoon picnic.

Much later flavoured coffee came into vogue and everyone seemed to think they enjoyed it. I did too; not to drink it exactly, but the fumes from the production of flavoured coffee struck me as almost pleasant. That kind of coffee was soon rejected, however, as the family migrated back to Mexican beans, fresh as they could get them, kept in the freezer, to be ground as needed.

That process was relinquished when social consciences became vividly aware of economic inequities in the world, and fair-trade organic coffee became the thing. The latest is that he has acquired his own roasting machine, and acquires, as needed, fair-trade organic coffee from a source in Toronto. He paid under $400 up front for the coffee roaster and a certain amount of coffee beans that would be his incrementally.

I mentioned somewhere back there how nasty the smell of brewing coffee is to my sensitive sense of smell. The first time he roasted coffee, the day following the receipt in the mail of the long-awaited coffee grinder, he made his way stealthily downstairs from our bedroom - ostensibly to let our senior dog out to do her thing - and began roasting.

It is an extremely noisy process, a grinding, whipping, groaning procedure, albeit not very prolonged. The unassuming, hitherto-unsmelly beans suddenly become aromatic in the process of roasting. Aromatic, that is, to the sense of a coffee lover; anathema to one for whom the smell is atrocious. As in vomitrocious.

Oh well, and ugh, ugh, ugh.

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