Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!

My husband loves coffee. I mean he LOVES coffee. Because he's health conscious he's not someone who drinks it all day, but it's those first two cups in the morning that make his life worth living and the other one as a pick-me-up around three in the afternoon that keeps him alive and alert and happy for the rest of the day.

He blames his love of the stuff on a good friend of his mother's, "Aunt" Rosemary. A memory of visiting at Aunt Rosemary's house when he was about five years old stands out in his mind. The ladies were having a chat over coffee, and he asked if he could please have a cup. (I've always suspected he was a precocious little bugger.) Aunt Rosemary dutifully poured him a cup of milk and added a dollop of her good, strong coffee. Roy says that was it for him. There is simply something in coffee that his body needs and cannot function without. But it must be good, strong, full-bodied, well-brewed coffee.

In Roy's lifelong quest for the "perfect" cuppa joe, he asked his daughter and son-in-law for an old-fashioned percolator coffeepot last Christmas. Of course, our daughter (who inherited a good dose of her father's "research" genes) found a nifty little stainless steel number that now gives him his requisite two cups of wonderful coffee each morning.

This perked coffee has turned out to be of such excellent quality that he decided we really should have a bigger percolator pot that would brew more cups at a time, in order to serve company. So he found this old Revere Ware pot on eBay that turned out to be in dandy shape.

I just love the looks of this coffeepot . . . so sturdy, so 1950s, so forever!

Even though I'm not a true, pure, coffee drinker (both my parents were big-time java lovers and often said they wondered if my brother and I had both been switched in the hospital at the time of our respective births because neither of us ever cared for the stuff), I do like my homemade latte most every morning. My little, cheapo espresso machine provides that one luscious cup of foamy milk laced with a little coffee flavoring which is just fine for me. But I sure do delight in the smell of Roy's perking coffee wafting through our house each morning now. I don't think you can get a better coffee aroma than from a percolating coffeepot.

Ah, yes, it truly is the little things in life. Or perhaps it's not such a little thing when you enjoy coffee the way my husband does. Take time to smell the roses? Absolutely. But don't forget the percolating coffee, too.