Tag: grieving my dead relatives

Dear Coffee, I love you

by Karen, posted in Angels, family, friends, Life in the cube, Work from Home

coffee“Before coffee, I’m up, I’m moving around, but I’m not awake,” said some wise soul somewhere. Until I typed the words, I actually couldn’t remember where I’d heard it but I just did. Peter Falk uttered this truism in one of his Columbo episodes.

Truer words (about me) were never spoken.

How did I get here?
College.

My other favorite coffee quote is from a Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail: 

“I love Patricia. Patricia’s amazing. Patricia makes coffee nervous.”

🙂

I have surrounded my coffee drinking with cool stuff. (Why should the tea drinkers have all the fun rituals?)

  1. A Keurig, so that I never have to wait more than 30 seconds for my coffee.
  2. Coffee straws (see picture), just because I like them.
  3. Cute mugs, like the Dunkin Donuts one pictured here. I have several of these because they remind me of my Dad (who was a doughnut maker once) and my friend Sheri (who bought me one I really wanted one year for my cubicle at work when I really didn’t need another coffee mug).
  4. My little coffee warmer. Okay, so I have two of these: one in my home office and one next to my bed. They make me happy.

My current favorite coffee is Green Mountain’s Spicy Eggnog, about which I often wax rhapsodic. Alas, it is a seasonal flavor.

So, I buy it by the case.  My friend Traci told me about Big Cat Coffees and the pricing there is FAB.U.LOUS.

Please participate in the poll below:

 

 

Comment below with your favorite coffee flavor!

Clutterfly

by Karen, posted in Marriage

My husband and I are currently having an….well, let’s call it an ongoing discussion…about my clutterfulness.

I admit it. I am a clutterholic.
In my defense, I have never claimed to be otherwise.
He has visions of my father’s brown paper bags-bags and bags (and bags) of stuff surrounding his chair- after he died…and thinks of me.
I’m not like that! I don’t have paper bags filled with junk surrounding my chair!
My bags are reusable shopping bags mostly.
Hmmmm….hello, Houston?

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Long time no see

by Karen, posted in Angels, family, good grief, Midlife Crisis, no fear

dad (1)I went to see Melissa at Deep Blue Truth in Kennebunk today. I go every year (at least once) near my birthday as a present to myself. I always get messages from one or more of my friends and relatives that have died, and today was no exception.
When they come through, they always talk about something that is personal to me and to them. Something that helps me know that it is really them. Something that no one else would know. They give some kind of a sign.

Today, someone named John came through. Okay, so John is my dad, so that’s a no brainer. Melissa told me that he kept telling her to say ‘matches’, to talk about striking matches.

!

Last night, I was talking to my husband, telling him I needed to get some more matches to light candles, that I was down to my last 2 books.  I joked that I was just coming to the end of my dad’s stockpile of boxes of matchbooks that we found in his house after he died…in 1998.

Pass the kleenex.

Cardinals

by Karen, posted in Adult children, Angels, family, good grief, Life in the cube, restaurants

cardinalI recently spent a few minutes (okay, hours) trolling the Facebook news feed and something caught my eye. Someone (sorry, I have no idea who or what or when exactly) posted that every time you see a red cardinal, that is a sign that a loved one that has died is saying hello to you, or something to that effect.

That’s nice, I thought.

Then a funny thing happened. I started noticing red cardinals.

  1. My friend Christine at work has a tapestry hung up in  her cube that depicts multiple red cardinals.
  2. I went to the movies to see The Nut Job (skip this one-see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty instead) and the bad guy’s side kick was a red cardinal. A squat, mean, nasty caricature of a cardinal, but still a cardinal.
  3. Today, I went to brunch at The Good Table in Cape Elizabeth and there in the foyer was a fake tree with cardinals all over the branches.

So, maybe this is just that phenomenon that happens to you when you are pregnant and you suddenly start seeing pregnant women everywhere you go.

On the other hand, this is the time of year that my mother and father died (mom 2/29/96 and dad 3/15/98) and so I am already thinking about them.

Maybe they are thinking about me, too.