Transitions

When I escaped from the Gulf Coast ten hours ahead of Hurricane Katrina last fall, all I had with me were my cats, one change of clothing, and a couple of books. The first thing I bought that first week in Baton Rouge was a hair dryer. After we got my father out of New Orleans and I drove him to Dallas to stay with a family friend, the second thing I bought, at the Wal-Mart on Midway Road, was a 4-cup Mr. Coffee coffee maker. After two weeks in Dallas, the coffee maker then traveled with me (and the cats) back to Baton Rouge, where it sat on my friend's kitchen countertop for the next 2 months and got daily use as I worked on the remains of my home in Bay St. Louis and decided where I was going to go from there with my life.

Right before Thanksgiving, we made the trip back to Dallas to stay with my father for two weeks. Then the coffee maker sat in the trunk of my car all the way to Portland, Oregon, where for the next three weeks, I slept on a mattress on the living room floor of the sole person I knew here at that time, while I was looking for a place to rent and spending hours driving around Portland, getting lost and finding my way out.

When I moved into the house on the creek, on January 7, there was already a Black & Decker coffee maker here that my new landlord had bought it for me. Unfortunately, that coffee maker never did work well, and in April it up and died. So my old friend Mr. Coffee took its place on my kitchen counter. It felt like coming full circle, and it was kind of neat to remember the things we'd been through together, the places where we'd lived while I was homeless, and to have it now serving me in my own home.

Last Wednesday, I got up in the morning, put the ground coffee in the basket, poured the water in, turned it on, and went off to boot up the computer. At some point, I realized that I wasn't hearing any action in the kitchen. When I went to check on the coffee, well ... the light was on, but no one was home. Sigh.

Mr. Coffee went out with the trash on Friday and has been replaced with a plastic cone device that sits on top of a coffee mug and filters one cup at a time, which is how I made coffee for many years and is actually my preference. (You get a lot more control that way, and there's not much that can go wrong with it.)

Also on Friday, I finally got my new driver's license in my new state of residence. So I'm officially here now. When it's time, it's time.

January 2011