Island Coffee

Kathy at the apothecary coffee shop had a degree in psychology, specializing in brain chemistry and a second degree in herbology. She looked a little like she didn’t belong, but if you saw her and spoke to her about anything at all intelligible she would smile her toothless smile and beam and gladly answer any reasonable question you put before her. The south end of the coffee house was her domain. Glass jars on wooden shelves: Spurelina, Sun Flower petals, Organic Celtic Sea Salt, Sassafras, Black Tara, Uva Ursi, Turkey Rhubarb, and Wild Cherry Bark; hundreds of things for tinctures, for drinking, for poultice, all to aide what ails you. There were sticks from India to brush your teeth and caplets full of rain forest mushrooms to help you breathe; Co-Q-ID to help the liver manage cholesterol sat on a shelf by the piano.

At the north end of coffee shop/roasterie, just to the right of the front door with the cowbell, looking out the window to the porch and the street beyond that, that’s where the old timers have their coffee clutch; talking of tractors and ferries and corn and their military days. There’s a good deal of talk about cars and talk about the weather, and how many things have changed. And how many things seem the same.

If you keep going, towards the restrooms, you go through the tasting room, with its’ stooled table and spittoon stations, the little coffee plant in the window and upstairs to the organic produce and other local fare, cheeses and wine, farm fresh eggs and milk. You might find Meredith or Gail stocking the shelves or otherwise taking care. There’s chatter about the new ice cream shop out by the back door, between the espresso and the parking. White Center ice cream on Vashon, local, fresh, that’s what the whole place feels like.

Over by the back door, by the espresso stand they’re dropping beans through a cylindrical shoot that fits in a hole in the floor. On roasting days, while the beans roast and cook and are dried on the big turning wheel, you can stand in the small hallway gallery and watch them slowly spin round. Most all the separating and designating and bagging and labeling goes on downstairs, out of sight of those seeking caffeine. The plate from the hole in the floor is removed and beans are poured in and fall down into a machine that weights them and places them into one, three, and five pound bags. Little ones love to watch them swirl down the hole and Len calls out from the window where the old folks have left,

"Watch out you don’t fall in there," Len says to a toe-headed kid in a yellow rain slicker.

"You can’t fall in, the hole is too small," says the kid

"Mark my words," says Len. "It only looks too small. Go ahead, I dare you, if you watch too hard you’ll get dizzy and if you get too dizzy you could fall down and go right down that hole and end up chopped into teeny tiny pieces."

"Ah mister, that’s just nonsense," says the kid kicking lightly at the hole to show that it’s far too small to fall through, dizzy or not.

"Maybe," is all Len will say, and his eyes twinkle like it just might be. That was the key to telling tall tales; say it like you believed it. The cowbell clanged and a woman walks in from the rain, immediately hit by the smell of fresh roasted coffee. She feels better already. It was going to be a good day.