Two In the Afternoon

It's been years since I've been to a café to write.

Before Covid. The new B.C. 

I'm spending a few days at the Washington house. We let the Internet go months ago, and I haven't learned how to use my phone as a hot spot yet.

Actually, I've always enjoyed writing in a café. I remember a writing workshop with Natalie Goldberg, and her saying that every writer should head to a café to write at least once a week. There's something about the community that's nourishing. I look around, here at Politics and Prose, and there must be at least a dozen writers here. Others are reading the paper or a book. What I'm not seeing is anyone chit chatting with friends over coffee or tea. The guy across the communal table is munching chips and reading The Post. A woman across the room is studying. People are coming and going. The cashier is counting change. Another replenishes pastries in the case. Smooth jazz plays in the background.

Floods test Vermont's quaint mountain towns in age of climate change

The guy reading The Post leaves the paper open while he carries his trash to the can. The headline looks up at me as if it wants to share its news. He carries the paper to a narrow wooden counter and leaves it for another reader.

I sip hot citrus chamomile tea from a black ceramic mug. It's the only beverage on the menu available to me, and it's good. The fragrance on the air teases me. I won't forget it's there. 

I stop and notice a girl who is taking notes with a stylus on an iPad. I ask her, "Are you taking notes on your iPad?" "Yes," she says, smiling. She speaks with me about how this has been a game changer for her while she's been in college. She asked her parents to get the iPad for her birthday and they did. It synchs to her laptop so she always has the notes. I tell her about the two, long banker's boxes filled with notebooks from college that I still have. It's such an interesting generational difference. But we connect over both liking to write our notes, I with pen and paper, she with stylus and iPad.

The café has emptied since I've been here. Most of the tables still are populated, but the communal tables no longer are crowded. The smells of all the different kinds of foods and drinks mingle. Someone walks by the counter and picks up a thin section of The Post. A woman and her teenage son share a mini, chocolate iced chocolate Bundt cake. The barista calls, "Katherine." I look up. It's reflex.

I hold the warm mug and muse over how isolated I still am. There are things I have not started to do again, like writing in cafés. I started back at the gym only a month ago. I've gone to one movie in the theater since the end of the Covid shutdown and to one concert. The other day, I thought about going to see Asteroid City at a small, community theater in Princeton. Movies theaters still give me the heebie-jeebies. All these little things make up a life and draw us out of our Hobbit-holes.

 

The Green Wilderness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.