The Exploding Coffee Pot
Coffee


In a split second the entire kitchen was covered with coffee grounds. I am not exaggerating the significance of the spray here. Every surface from the stovetop to the windows to the floor was covered. The walls, with the exception of a cartoon cutout in the vague shape of my torso and head were black. I felt hot grit hit my back with a bang. What I could not understand was how so little coffee could impact so many surfaces.

In our effort to get set up with a regular routine in life, and all of our worldly belongings back in our apartment in the States, we bought one of those hexagon shaped coffee pots that absolutely everyone uses here called a Moka. John tried to use it one day and it just oozed coffee from the base. We set it aside to return to the store, but hungry for coffee this morning, I decided that John probably didn’t use it properly and decided to try again.

I had just checked the pot by lifting the lid to see that coffee was burbling up as it should, in fact I was in the process of gloating to myself as I was walking away when the bomb went off. After I realized I was having a Lucy moment, I started to laugh and immediately ached for my mother, probably the only other human being whom this would strike as insanely funny.

Unfortunately, it was John and not my mother who was here to witness the aftermath of the debacle. “It’s even inside the light fixture”, which made his Virgo skin crawl. I knew that every time he entered the kitchen, no matter how much I cleaned, he would feel the coffee grounds under his feet. To his credit he bit back the obvious “I told you so” and asked if I was okay.

I learn new things every day here and today I learned there are differences in paint. Somehow the paint I am used to lets you wipe if off most things. There is another kind of paint that comes off with a hard scrub and does not forgive a hard blast of hot coffee. Fortunately, this type of paint does take touch ups well, so after scrounging around in the basement, John found the leftover paint and the evidence of my fiasco is pretty much all gone. Aside from the faint smell of coffee whenever you enter the room, which is not altogether unpleasant.