Tag Archives: coffee

Three Years as “Mom”

Posted on by under Finding Place

If you’ve never picked up your life and moved hundreds of miles away to a place where you know no one, I highly recommend it.

At 26, I was burnt-out on teaching after only three years, uncertain of what my future looked like, and my always-dreaming-of-new-places heart was ready to take a leap.  I got on the computer. After a few hours on google, I applied for three jobs, got an interview for one, and within a few months  had whittled the contents of my apartment down into what would fit into a small SUV– rented, one-way, from Atlanta to Chicago.

I moved into a 125 year old house that came with the job, a short walk from the shores of Lake Michigan.  Already living in the house were three other adults and eight teenagers. The easiest way to explain my new job is that I worked for a nonprofit boarding school. I was one of four “house moms” to a group of smart, dedicated, and brave young women who made the choice as 7th, 8th, or 9th graders to live mostly away from their families in order to make their education a priority.  In many ways, the people in that house lived as a family.

My favorite parts of the job were easily things like waking up  a little earlier on cold mornings so the kids had cups of tea or hot chocolate to take with them to the school. I would often stand just inside the front door and say good-bye, shivering against the cold Chicago wind, as they walked out the door with smiles on their faces and gloved-hands clutching mugs. The highlight of the day was almost always dinner. At least four nights a week we gathered around the extra long dining room table and there was a chorus of “please pass the . . .” as dinner plates were filled and then stories from the day began.

Our dining room table, set for a Christmas Party.

Our dining room table, set for a Christmas Party.

One late spring day one of “my” kids came home to say that she needed to take fruit to a school function the next week. The morning of the event I pulled out a fruit platter with oranges and kiwi and grapes and strawberries arranged in an alternating, symmetrical color pattern. She looked at the tray and then back at me and said, “Did you buy this?”

“No. I made it last night.”

“Wow. It’s so pretty! Thank you!”

When I was a kid, the thing that I most wanted was to be a mom. There were a few years in college where my life seemed to  moving towards my dream of  “get married young and start a family.” While that didn’t happen, my desire to be a mom remained. But there, with fruit tray in hand, I realized something.  It was a simple moment in the midst of a life that included dishes and laundry and “turn down that music” and checking on homework and a million things that were very mom-like, but it was that moment when I knew that I had found my place. Somehow, my always-wanted-to-be-a-mom heart was getting to live its dreams.

At the beginning of November I was back in Chicago for a few short days as part of a work trip. I drove past the old house and paused for just a few moments, giving thanks for what I learned those three years and have continued to live out since: I am a person who wants to make spaces safe and welcoming. That is a passion and a desire that can be lived out no matter if anyone calls me “mom” or not.

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Nicole bio YAH

Refuge

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

As a nine-year old recent refugee I often felt lonely. The kids at school, taking their queue from ubiquitous images of famine-stricken Ethiopian children with protruding stomachs and flies milling around their eyes, referred to me as Starving Ethy—Ethy being short for Ethiopian. The school often isolated me, with other aliens, in a special class they called English as a Second Language. When not at school, I spent most of my time alone, roaming the neighborhood, scavenging for odds and ends, finding the occasional Garbage Pail Kids trading card or a broken Transformers figurine.

Yet my family and I were not alone. Like many other refugees before them, Eritreans in the U.S. had begun to conform to an old pattern. The first group arrived in a specific city by design. They resettled there as part of a grand scheme cooked up in the mind of civil servants sitting in a conference room somewhere. These special refugee programs preselected some location in the U.S. that they thought made sense for the refugees. And these displaced people didn’t know any better. Des Moines is San Diego. San Diego is Des Moines. It’s all the same to those simply trying to escape calamity.

But once the trauma of transition abates and with the gift of time, these immigrants grow familiar with their new homeland. They also grow restless. They long to be with people like them. They are drawn to DC by an old friend from the refugee camps in Sudan, to Seattle by a neighbor from the village back home, to San Diego by a former fellow rebel-fighter. Mostly though, they are simply glad to cluster their lives around other Eritreans. These people, in their search for more than refuge, shift and move; drawn to each other to dull the bite of loneliness.

It is through this familiar road that a growing number of Eritreans made their way to Atlanta. It is why a room full of Eritreans greeted my mom and me during one of our routine visits to one of these Eritrean families on one sunny and beautiful afternoon. The home, a unit at one of the local public housing properties, was overflowing with strangers, old friends, and cousins of cousins.

After the customary cheek-to-cheek greetings, my mom joined the other adults who were dutifully occupied by a coffee tradition that must date back to the beginning of time. All the guests sat together outside on the porch in a semi-circle with the hostess at the juncture and a brazier at her side.

5543145597_017e65feb6_zLike the old priests and their censers, the hostess filled the air with the scent of roasting coffee, giving each guest the occasion to waft and savor the aroma rising from the roasting pan. She ground the beans and carefully poured them into the jebena, a special kettle made of clay. After adding a cup or so of water, she placed the jebena on the brazier to work its heat as the ancient taste brewed with slow serenity. When it was time, she slowly filled each finjal, small ceramic drinking cups decorated with beautiful patterns in different colors, moving continuously from cup to cup until the circle was complete.

It was a well-choreographed ritual wrapped in a thick blanket of gossip, debate and gloating, each adult trying to outflank the other with their better tales and more exciting news. They moved from topic to topic, sometimes with rambunctious energy and sometimes with solemn prayer depending on the mood of each issue — all of this they consumed with wide open hearts, as they sipped their scrupulously prepared coffee. While the adults sat on the porch consumed by their disputations, I joined the kids playing out in the field an earshot away.

In many ways these interactions are perfectly symbolic of the solitude we all felt in that place. A white American friend once described a moment she’d experienced in Shanghai, China. After living there for years, she ran into a black man, the first speckle of diversity she’d seen in a long time, while strolling along at some shopping district. As soon as she spotted him, she ran over and asked if she could give him a hug, explaining that he reminded her of home. The stranger obliged.

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Biniam“Refuge” was written by Biniam Gebre. Biniam is a former refugee from Eritrea, a beautiful and young country in East Africa. He is also the former acting Commissioner of the the Federal Housing Administration. Both in his professional life and personal struggles, he is in constant search to understand the meaning of place. He currently lives in Washington D.C. Biniam blogs at Choices and Values and can be found on Twitter @biniamgebre.

Photo of the jebena, above, is by Canned Muffins.

On mornings, intention, and getting still enough

Posted on by under Food & Place, Guest

I’m no purist. As soon as the temperature dips below 90—usually mid-October in this part of Texas—I start pouring eggnog into my coffee. This may be one of few truly habitual morning routines I have. By design, I resist routine in the mornings. I have never been the sort of person that wakes the same time, has the same breakfast, has the same commute. I don’t find this to be noble. I have tried with limited success to become that sort of disciplined person, anchored in morning ritual and liturgy of coffee cup and toast point and made bed. I manage for a few days, at most, and then the resolve slips away from me and I’m back to a disordered sense of morning duty, careening from grocer to writing to recycle bin to conference call.

But eggnog in the coffee cup, that point in October when it becomes justified, slows me down just enough. I catch myself getting still, hearing my breath, the way the brick of the apartment whistles when wind cuts across it, the feel of the cement beneath bare feet. I sit across from the windows that keep watch with the sunrise and pull out the notebook, forgotten too often during the late season of summer, where pen is set to craft recipe, reason out flavor, and I plan a menu for the week. I get still enough to be mindful, yet again, of Alexander Schmemann’s speculation that no matter how utilitarian we have managed to make everything else, food remains something sacred to us, something that cannot be pure utility. There is reverence in the wielded knife and the butchered lamb, a kind of sacrament of patience in the warm of the midday loaf set on the windowsill to rise.

unnamedEggnog in the coffee cup returns me to this practice of noticing, attending to the detailed work of craft. I am no hater of technology, no scorner of social media, but in the brevity of the early morning pause, the breviary of an ordinary life, I disconnect just long enough to be mindful. Mindfulness is an underrated virtue. It doesn’t boast a great deal of acclaim. But mindfulness keeps us observant of ourselves and of the spaces we inhabit, keeps us intentional and keeps us kind. When I pause long enough to be careful, I am reminded of the miracle that it is to live, to taste, to smell, to make. We are alchemists of invitation and acceptance in our kitchens. We present common sacrament upon our tables. We offer chairs as signs of worth. We prepare tables as icons of welcome.

All this from eggnog in the coffee cup. Just enough of a pause in the waking hour, when the sun first colors the skyline, to remember the good work of being present, being focused, being exactly where I am. This is a ritual I can return to, when all else about routine fails. Clasped coffee cup tinged with sweetness, this takes me back to the center, to the contentment of the very moment.

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Yancey.Headshot-5“On mornings, intention, and getting still enough” was written by Preston Yancey. Preston is an Anglican priest-in-training, an author, sometimes-painter, sometimes-baker, sometimes-scholar interested in Christian theology and the arts. He wrote Tables in the Wilderness, a book about God and silence, and lives with his wife, Hilary, in Waco, Texas.