You spoon 42g of ground Columbian coffee into the French press. You then pour boiled water to the base of the brand name; La Cafetière.
You bring the French press into the sitting room and set it on the coffee table between the two armchairs. You return to the kitchen for two cups, both containing a small fill of milk, and scoop a half spoon of sugar into one. In the sitting room, you pour the pressed coffee to one centimetre below the rim of each cup. This is the process your father used, and it’s still the way he enjoys his evening coffee.
‘Did you remember the sugar Cait?’ he asks from his fireside chair.
‘Yes.’ you answer with a smile, happy he has remembered such a minute detail.
‘Good, and you made a cup of tea for your mother?’
‘Yes.’ you say, lying.
You pick up your cup and walk to the bay window; coffee steam rising like a ghost of shipwreck. You see your childhood sandbox in the garden, its metal frame rust-red against the ever-green lawn, sand writhing in lonesome Atlantic squalls. On a window seat cushion, your mother’s knitted blanket rests folded. You remember the tedious winter she spent engrossed in its creation. You see it sprawled for garden picnics and laid across her legs on nights she slept on the sofa. You feel it comforting your shoulders as you sat by the fire the day she passed. It is her eternal embrace.
You take it and run it over your shoulders, squeezing a fistful to your nose. Her bergamot scent survives in its fibres, the nostalgia and warmth of youth and vitality. You breathe her in. You see her again, watching you play from the window. You would dig and build to impress her, each creation bolder than the last. She would come to inspect your designs and carry you inside as evening began to droop onto the land. After a bath, she would wrap the blanket so tightly around you that to take it off was to ballet. You think of the day the sandbox fun died.
‘Mary? Where’s Cait?’ your father asks, returning you to the room.
‘Sorry?’ you say, searching his perplexed face.
‘Where’s Cait? It’ll be dark out there in a minute.’
You process his confusion and look towards the sandbox. Beneath the grey sky, you see yourself constructing the imaginations of childhood with plastic buckets and shovels. You are digging and building for your watching mother’s approval and affection. You smile at her, and she smiles at you.
‘Mary? Where’s Cait?’ your father asks again, ‘Isn’t it time she came in?’
You nod and caress the blanket as you watch the sandbox.
‘I’ll give her another minute John,’ you say, ‘she just looks so happy.’
-end-
all words are mine. if you enjoyed the piece, let me know.
Gene Murphy Writer 
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