The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

 I am an early riser. It is quiet, it is serene, it is beautiful, it is hopeful to begin a new day while the rest of my house sleeps, most especially when everyone is on holiday and no one has to bustle anywhere. It is even sweeter when it is a weekday, when the calls of schedules and meetings, classes and assignments, bottom lines and budget projects, are not what takes up all the waking energy. So I sit and absorb the stillness. Contemplate and wonder about what will unfold. Today, it is the Kwanzaa Principle of Kuumba, Creativity, that hopeful optimism of ones art being welcomed into the world just for the sake of its beauty, to celebrate a beautiful people who this year saw products beyond the IG and Etsy shops but in Target's Black Makerspace, in HBCU t-shirts being sold at mall department stores, at Black becoming mainstream. It is beautiful to behold, after the year,  years we've had with protest for our Black American humanity and the pandemic that hit Black and Brown ...

 I think a lot in the early morning. I woke up to the house still and a yearning to just muse. I picked up my copy of The Strong Black Women: How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women by Marita Golden and read the imagined thoughts of the late Fannie Lou Hamer. In it, she wrote about her body broken by the systems of hatred, racism, and sexism that sadly haven't gone away since her days organizing with SNCC. Women have had a tough year. Black women and women of the Global Majority have had a near impossible year. So, I woke up thinking about them, us, me, this morning. A bit of me is exhausted. Perhaps it is because I am an early riser and daylight savings time means nothing to me. Maybe it is because my youngest son is bringing his girlfriend home for Christmas because Covid cancelled family plans back home for her, and my house is a wreck. Ok, maybe wreck is too strong a word, but it is different when company comes. Tired because I haven't wrapped a...

 I woke up this morning to snow. Not the major snow my new state gave me last year, I'm still waiting for that sink-to-my-knees snow that blanketed the three acres around my house.  What we have is just beautiful sun streaming down on just enough white fluffy stuff to make the trees glisten and the drive to my daughter's school this morning feel like a winter wonderland. I wanted to just slow down, get out and take pictures. She wanted to get to school. So I made her roll down the window to capture some images, we were in a long car line, after all, what else was she going to do. And I marveled. It is a bright, crisp, clear day that is begging for us to notice her. To see her. Acknowledge her presence. Mother Nature gives us moments like this. The change of seasons looms ahead, it is still technically fall, and while the calendar has turned to December and upcoming thoughts of holiday gifts fill our to-do lists, it is still fall and a being. Being present with how I am feeling...

 In my mind's eye, I envision a table full of older Black women sipping coffee and talking about the socioculturalpolitical events of this near-year-end of 2021. I envision them each pontificating about everything from the mask wearing,  vaccine denying, school protesting nimkumpoops who have swallowed up all our collective cultural air. Would they hrumphf like I can imagine? I think so. They would remind us and regale us with stories of these same types of their younger days who are still around because they are still around. "Chile, yt folks scared of their shadow," I can hear them saying in my mind's eye. A fear brought about by the works of their own hands. The ancient writing in the Holy Scriptures are coming back to me, you truly do reap what you sow. And maybe that is what has them so petrified that the gun range down the street from me is popping off at all hours of the early morning. Their imagination is running wild and they can't catch it. We need the e...

 My last child turned 18 on December 1st. The days leading up to her celebration threw me into moments of nostalgia and memory, memories that I theatrically regaled her with every afternoon that I picked her up.  Right up to the day before her big day and she stopped me when I was going to tell her, yet again, about the day of her birth. "Mama, can you save that one for tomorrow?" At first I was taken aback.  It is my one and only time of year for all my children to tell the story of how they came to enter the world on the day they entered.  But this one wanted me to save it. As I drove to the store for an item for her weekend gathering of friends, I thought about what she was and was not saying. Maybe she wanted me to cherish it more, to really ponder what happened over the past eighteen years. Maybe she was tired of hearing about it, complete with tales of her almost exact-to-the-minute gender-unknown birthday twin born next door at the same hospital by the same do...

 It was really quiet this rainy Black Friday morning. No one in my home was awake when I was frothing milk for my rosemary brown sugar vanilla latte.  Comforted by the soft whir of their sleep, I sipped my creamy latte and watched daylight dawn on our second Thanksgiving weekend in our new state.  It feel right. Like home. No one wanted to leave. From dinner last night with everyone's favorites to annual games of Uno and Spades to movies until everyone fell asleep, no one wanted to stir. That was the gift. The joy and laughter of the youngest daughter with the youngest son, their banter as only siblings can have. When the first ones started to stir a few hours later, awakens to the smells of my husband flipping bacon and adding cheese to the eggs, it was the moment when joy just enveloped me. Home has been their destination. This year, my older daughter is visiting her college boyfriends' family and my youngest son came home with his girlfriend. The youngest daughter was ...

 I was in Target this afternoon, grabbing a few pre-Turkey Day items for my daughter. We didn't do the cart-full of a normal run and thought we'd just run in and out. All was well until my daughter pointed to the aisle that was open. I moved my cart to the aisle and the young woman, Asian-American, said, "Oh, ma'am, I'm closed, sorry." I looked up and her light was out. I replied, "oh, wow, I didn't even look, thanks." I moved over to the open aisle next to this one and was just waiting, the lady in front of me in my new one and the one I was just at both had long purchases. My daughter was off on her make-up or whatever second-look in the cosmetic aisle so I wasn't in a hurry. I was just looking through my phone when I noticed something that annoyed me. Here comes a lady, about my age, I'm Black, she was White, and she goes to the aisle I just left. This was about five minutes later, mind you, both ladies in front of us were still engagi...