pieces and ponderings

I fixed a pot of coffee this morning in my coffee pot that I love (see earlier post)…and because it’s Friday and the end of the week, I decided I had better add a little of the caffeinated variety of coffee to my regular decaf variety. I could smell it brewing as I prepared lunches and breakfasts and let the cat in and the dog out.

I looked forward to my first cup…knowing that it would probably lead to a second cup after everyone had left the house except for me and the dog and the cat. So as the morning progressed and my boys and husband left for school and work, and I downed the last bit of coffee in my cup before I took a shower…I spit what I had just drunk into my bathroom sink.

“Yucky!!” I exclaimed in my head. The last gulp of coffee had contained a bunch of coffee grounds…which are so gross if they end up in your mouth. Now the coffee grounds were scattered all over my bathroom sink. I turned on the water and rinsed the yucky little coffee grounds down the drain.

I had noticed a couple of little…very little…black dots floating in my coffee when I had first poured it.  I had carefully removed them with a spoon, but I didn’t see any more than those couple of little…very little…coffee grounds…so I didn’t think any more about it.

After I spit the coffee grounds into the sink, I went and checked my coffee-maker and sure enough the filter had gotten folded up in it’s little filter basket and there were coffee grounds outside the filter that had also been washed down into the carafe.

“Ahhh…bummer,” I thought.  I dismissed the thought of having a second cup. Finding coffee grounds in a last swig of coffee just isn’t pleasant and I didn’t want that to happen again.

I considered that I could be very careful and drink the second cup s-l-o-w-l-y…NOT drinking the last little bit in the cup and leaving Herman the fish (see earlier post) covered with the half-decaf-half-caffeinated beverage.

Maybe that would work? Then I had an idea…light bulb!

Maybe I could place a filter in my cup and pour the coffee through a filter a second time?  It just might work.

So that’s what I did.  I got out another coffee filter and placed it in my washed-out-coffee-grounds-free cup and began to pour coffee down through it.

It took a little time, and a bit of effort and patience. But…it worked…for the most part.  In fact, my second-cup-of-coffee-for-the-day-in-my-Herman-the-fish-mug is sitting on a coaster on my desk as I write.

Even with the second filtering process having been implemented…there were still a couple of little black dots…very little black dots…floating around in the coffee as I removed the filter from my mug.  I know what that means…so I will not be gulping down that last little bit of coffee for fear of coffee dregs lurking beneath the surface.  Drinking the top half of the coffee in my mug will do me just fine.

As I was re-filtering my second cup of coffee this morning, I thought about filters and their importance.  For coffee lovers everywhere…filters ARE IMPORTANT! And I thought about other filters that serve important functions in our lives…fuel filters…air vent filters…internet filters…all the other filters that I don’t know about or can’t think of right now.

AND I thought about other kinds of filters in my life…filters for my spiritual life…filters for my conscience…filters for my thinking.  What happens when the filters that I’ve put in place in those areas get bent out of shape or moved out of place and can’t completely serve their function any more?

What kind of yucky dregs wind up in my thinking…in my emotional life…in my heart?  Filters…they are good things to have.  Filters…they serve a good purpose.  Filters…we need to make sure they are in their proper places so they can function at their best.