PastorBlastor

Ramblings from Retirement – Coffee and Lilies By Pastor (retired) Lee Hemen April 8, 2022 I’m sitting here with my cup of coffee looking out my dining room window. I need to go out and put more birdseed in the birdfeeders. However, I enjoy this time away from the news and concerns of the world. It is the simple things in life that should cause us to pause and enjoy the moment. I have always enjoyed a simple cup of coffee, black, nothing else, ever since I was a child. Yep, I learned the joy of coffee when I was about five or six years old from my mother. Now her coffee could grow hair on a bald dog. She learned how to boil it in a skillet and make it about the consistency of thick black mud. A peculator pot was a new-fangled invention that she began to begrudgingly use and later we convinced her to use a drip coffee maker - a necessity electrical appliance that was constantly on from sunup until bedtime in her house. Interestingly, she drank her cup-o-Joe with lots of cream and two to ...

 Ramblings from Retirement – Find Your Peace By Retired Pastor Lee Hemen May 6, 2021 For me there is nothing better in the morning than to sit listening to the squirrels chattering outside, the red-winged blackbirds singing, and the sounds of people mowing lawns while I begin my day drinking a black cup of coffee. I grind some Guatemala Antigua beans, make four cups of the smoothest tasting dark nectar there is. My mother taught me to drink straight black coffee. Except her coffee was often boiled in a pan of water on the stove and had the consistency of crude oil. Instead of pouring it you cut off a chunk and swallowed it whole. She would often let it cook on the stove or in her newfangled peculator all day as she wandered back and forth getting a new chunk in her cup. She learned to make coffee as a young girl in Wyoming cooking for cowhands. Lest you think it had a detrimental effect on her, she lived into her early 90’s and continued to drink plain black crude oil of coffee all...