When coffee blooms [#6 doña Virginia]

When coffee blooms

         for doña Virginia

Snow sits in shadows that last two months. On the north-side of town I inhale coffee, listen to old music. Your sunshine cannot reach me here. Yet soon I'll return ... just like you said I would.

I would inhale coffee in bloom at the end of winter, the harvest just begun, their ruby red cherries stripped to beans, now drying under the sun. On the north-side of green-clad mountains there are shadows ... even that far south. Snow like ashes cannot bother you now.

I return. I return. Like the song you once sang, "volver, volver" stuck in my mind. I cannot unwind time to tell you how much your kindness meant, how much the kindness of your family still means to me. I return to the melody of a less stressful life. Why did I listen to my internal strife, the disharmony that kept me away far too long.

I long for coffee served with hot milk in a cup, not a mug. I long to bring it close to my lips and inhale the fragrance of flowers, slip into memories of decades long past, to sip on the north-side of a mountain town, sit in green coffee shadows and sing to myself, "volví".

I've returned.

© Kåre Enga [168.192] #6 November 3, 2011.