HEMINGWAY & BREAKFAST

I woke up after just a couple hours of sleep to prepare coffee and breakfast. The hound howled outside at the passing sirens, and the dogs next door barked in impatience that his howls are the only sounds he makes.

We're low on money, and so I make the cheap, ground coffee, and I do so as potent as possible. I heat what's left of our butter on the stove and crack the eggs on top to sizzle. I pour water across them, and cover them to trap in the steam. I toast the bread and scrape the walls of the jam jar to get every last boysenberry preserve. Joe has his standard breakfast of three fried eggs, over easy, between two sandwiches. I give this to him with napkins, which he'll need once he bites down into the soft yokes, and they come pouring down his chin and into his red beard. It happens every time, but he doesn't take them any other way. I make sure to let him know the left sandwich is the one with two yokes. I have my standard breakfast, two fried eggs heavily peppered, and two pieces of toast with jam on them. I wish I had a gin and tonic to go with this, but it's still perfect, so I enjoy my charcoaly, black coffee instead. 

It's when we are low on money and food that these simple meals are so delicious. It was Hemingway that taught me to savor. It was his tangerines and bag of nuts in his small, drafty apartment in Paris that filled my mouth with the taste of appreciation for small luxuries and moments. He says art is best taken in with an empty stomach, and I believe that the world becomes much brighter with one as well. When you are hungry and get the chance for a bite at bread and cheese, and to wash it down with a good drink, you savor every bite and remember every passing second. It's one of the few ways that you can be assured that you are truely living. You'll know that you're living the way we're all meant to - by appreciating every second that passes without looking in the past or to the future.

I miss our first house. The small, decrepit thing. It was there that I would read A Moveable Feast and Islands in the Stream day in and day out, over and over. In the summer I'd sit on our front steps with a room temperature coffee or a cold beer and read, or draw. And I would come inside with a new desire to eat simply and treasure it. When my husband complained of financial burdens I'd quote Hemingway to him and we'd look at how beautiful our life was. We'd remember all over again, that our house is always full of friends, and strangers soon to be. There'd be music filling the spaces between the people piled into our living room and kitchen, and nobody minded standing along a wall all night, or sitting snug next to a stranger.