The Fifteen-Minute Rule

July fifteenth. The cold brew situation started because the coffee shop two blocks over raised their prices again and I did the math and then I did not go back. That is the whole origin story. Nothing romantic about it.

But here is what I did not anticipate: making cold brew at home means there is a step where you have already done everything and you just have to wait. You cannot hurry it. The concentrate sits in the fridge for at least twelve hours and then you pour it over ice and then you sit there. For a moment before you drink it, the whole thing is just condensation on a glass and the sound of ice shifting. That is the part I keep coming back to.

the pour

I have been thinking about the sketchbook lately, the macramé cord still tucked in there from June, the seventh drawing of the cord sitting in there like a sentence I finished but haven't read aloud yet. There is a similar quality to the waiting. The thing is done. The thing is sitting there. You are not in a hurry, exactly, but you are aware that you are not in a hurry, which is its own kind of awareness. The cold brew just made it legible.

Anyway. It is mid-July and I am thirty-two years old and I have become someone who makes their own cold brew concentrate on Sunday nights and considers the pouring of it on Thursday mornings to be a minor event. This is who I am now. Gerald got a new leaf last week too, which feels related somehow, though I could not tell you how.