Food, Wine, Good (and Evil) Spirits

A coffee farmer shared with me that the most injury prone job picking coffee involves climbing.  When one hand is holding the tree and the other a machete--what are you left with to swat the bugs?  

Last March I traveled to a coffee plantation in Nicaragua to help run a volunteer medical and dental clinic for the workers, their families, and the villagers.  The team set up shop in an open-air church and saw 1,200 patients in a week.  Babies with distended bellies from parasites, respiratory infections, decayed teeth, dehydration.  Patients lined up.  Machete wounds were common.  One involved a bee.

I was overwhelmed by the emotion of it--watching some brave person getting teeth pulled, barely betraying their pain.  I would walk out to the rainforest and indulge in a good cry.  I expected the week to be hard--what surprised me was the joy.  Despite the intense emotions, I also laughed harder that week than I could remember doing for a long time.  (Sometimes because the very earnest nurses were so bad at Spanish.  Also there was a broken toilet seat incident.)  It's no secret.  Volunteering feeds the soul.  

There are three types of people in this world: those that like cherries, those that like cherry-flavored, and those that like neither (or both, which makes this category 4 I suppose).  I’m wedged into the latter but have slowly learned to appreciate the seasonal gift of fresh cherries.

Please don’t get me wrong. There are no agendas, no personal allergic antedotes, nothing of the sort. Growing up fresh cherries weren’t a part of my family menu. To us, cherries were the gloopy, glossy globes that didn’t need a cherry pitter but a can opener. Something tells me that’s not quite the way Mother Nature intended them to be enjoyed but purely an act out of mankind’s thifty desire to preserve their short season.

It’s only been the past few years that I’ve learned to have my way with fresh cherries in the kitchen and that has resulted in a slight cherry crush. I don’t want to eat cherry pie or clafoutis unless you can convince me you made it yourself and please for the love of god keep any fauxcherryanything far away from me. That includes Luden’s.

Still, I can’t help but get a teensy bit excited when I see cherries.

We all have those incredible sensory memories where just the slight aroma sends us back to a treasured moment. Our minds are suddenly flooded with images and a sense of time and place that once was. While I have many of those memories tucked away in my heart, there is one in particular that plays to a tea tune.

It was one of those perfect fall days in New York where the air was crisp but nowhere near close to cold. Running down the streets of SoHo to meet a dear friend, I found her waiting with a smile in front of In Pursuit of Tea’s shop (which I must sadly say is no longer open).  We opened the glass door to the tiny store with exposed brick walls that seemed to glow like autumn leaves on the treeless street.  

Shelves were lined with traditional cups and teapots, and a blackboard displayed what teas were being sampled that day. Within seconds, my whirlwind of joy calmed as my eyes settled on the word “oolong” written across the board. For those of you who have followed me on my tea journey, you know that oolong tea makes my heart sing. I turned to face the woman pouring tea from a gaiwan and gently approached her. She extended a delicate cup and before I brought the sip to my lips, I heard her share that it was their “high mountain oolong tea.” Even though I was grounded in fall just moments ago, my senses shifted to spring as the floral notes escaped through the steam. With just one sip I found myself lost in a field of honeysuckle flowers. It was at that very moment that I knew I had found a treasured tea, a transformative tea.  

From the Huffington Post

They say the eyes are the window to a person's soul, but I disagree. I'm pretty sure it's the hair. Seriously.

For the sake of this article, I'm going to go ahead and admit that I judge people, and I judge them by their hair. I'm not saying everyone does this, I'm saying I do this, and I'll go ahead and tell you why.

You can judge a person on their shoes (Louboutins or Converse?), or what they wear (Armani or Anthropologie?), and that's fine. And hey, you'll probably get somewhere with that, maybe by going a little deeper and analyzing how they wear something: Does she mix Versace with vintage? Are her jeans skinny or flared? And just how flared and how expensively distressed?

All important factors. They might tell you how much money (or credit card debt) she has and if she lives on 73rd or somewhere between Bedford and Lorimer, but what they don't tell you is how much fun she'll be three-beers-deep on a girl's night out. What will? Her hair.

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