Coffee: It's a Good Thing

I like coffee. One time Ann mentioned that you pick your drug of choice by age 35. After that, you don't really stray. It's rare, according to this theory, for a 45 year old to decide one afternoon to start snorting cocaine.

Coffee is my drug. Not just caffeine. I don't drink red bull or mountain dew or even regular iced tea (I like herbal iced tea, though, usually caffeine free). I came to coffee late in life--by way of coffee ice cream, actually. My dad drinks coffee, but never made it at home. My mother likes the smell but not the taste. I was with her. Until I got to high school and realized if a family of six buys three half gallons of ice cream a month, and one of them is coffee by my request, it lasts the month. The strawberry or caramel swirl or whatever is gone in a moment, but I still have that option long after it's all gone. Until my sisters figured this trick out, it was great (and I still had the metabolism required to eat that much ice cream...). So it sneaked up on me. But just like my short trip into alcoholism when I was 22, once I got a hang of it, I went fast. Three years ago, in a 5 month span, I went from coffee ice cream to frozen coffee sweet over the top 4000 calorie things to iced coffee with milk and caramel syrup to (winter came) white chocolate mochas to coffee with sugar or milk, either was fine, milk preferred. I blame Ann, in some ways, because our Wednesday coffee mornings were at places with bottomless refill cups.

But then this spring, when everything seemed to crash down around me, before I realized, duh, it's my thyroid, I decided it was time to start giving up the coffee. Not entirely. Just really cut back. I did--and of course, I crashed even faster for a couple of weeks. I would have a single cup of coffee on Wednesday mornings, and through the week, not much at all. Hot coffee in the summer is a weird idea to me, anyway.

I am always reminded of my Aunt Paula telling the story of her (and my dad's) grandparents, Anna and Edward, sitting at their north side kitchen table in the middle of the summer, her grandfather in an undershirt and shorts and grandmother in a housedress, no fans on, the windows barely open, everyone sweating, and both of them smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee. Ugh.

This morning, I had a cup of coffee. Two, actually. And it didn't hit me how great everything was going until about a half hour ago. My house is clean, my kids are cooperative, the sink is polished. Laundry is folded and new laundry is washing. Trash went out, downstairs is vacuumed, the fridge is cleaned, and I even did some mending. Mending. It was while I was mending that it occurred to me that two cups of coffee, perhaps every two or three days, is just what I need. I just need to make sure it doesn't turn into 8 or 9 cups every day. Prudence.