Cup of love

In our marriage, we take the French presses very, very seriously. We started using one to make coffee because it’s so low tech. That appeals to the essentialists in us. We run into a problem, though, because I need to drink an entire French press in the morning to wake up. Ellen and I tussled over it on weekend mornings for a long time. There were a lot of dust-ups when she would want to drink some coffee when I hadn’t had a full pot yet. It would seem so reasonable to her that she should get some of my coffee and I was not reasonable because I hadn’t had enough coffee yet to be reasonable. Then she found another one at a yard sale for $5. Now we have two, hers and mine, and they sit next to each other on the kitchen counter. There are no more tussles over coffee in the morning.

We need two coffee pots, which is funny for us to say because most couples would be fine with one coffee pot. We don’t need a lot of things that a lot of other American families say they need, such as two cars and a dishwasher and a steady stream of new clothes. It’s one of the reasons that our marriage works; we agree to a great extent that we don’t have to have the same stuff that everyone else does. We also agree that when we land on things that are ridiculous but work for us – such as “We need two coffee pots,” – we just do it.

When we lived in DC we didn’t make coffee. We bought it at work or at Mr. Kim’s, the corner store that was next to our apartment building. When we moved to Berkeley there wasn’t cheap coffee on the corner (though there is very expensive coffee on the corner) so we got the french press.

For years I hated the way that Ellen didn’t clean it. She would make coffee in the morning and let the grounds sit in the bottom of the pot all day long. It fucking killed me every weekday to come home and see the dirty pot with the old grounds. I never said anything about it to her, though, because although I hated it passionately I knew it was a little thing. It was trivial and it fucking infuriated me. It’s the kind of trivial thing couples fight about all the time. On Saturday morning I would hate it even more when I threw out her old grounds and washed the pot. I would unscrew the three layers of filters from the plunger and wash them with soap, one by one. I made coffee and then I washed it again so it would be clean on Sunday morning. I did that for years, hating the way she didn’t wash every time.

And then – and I don’t remember when this happened exactly – I stopped washing out the french press. I left the grounds in on Saturday and they were still there on Sunday morning and everything was fine. Now that I work from home I make coffee in a dirty french press every morning. The French press is all mine – because Ellen has her own – and I could wash if if I wanted to. I don’t. Her way, the way I hated for years, is better.

There are so many things I am sure of in my life, and when I am too sure of them I think about washing the french press. There are so many things that she does that I hate. Most of them I don’t hate as much as I hated the dirty french press. I try not to call her on them because they might be like the french press. I could be wrong and she could be right and it could be years before I realize it.