Sprinkles In My Coffee

"Sprinkles make everything better," my mom likes to say.

This saying goes back to summer excursions to McDonald's for soft serve ice cream cones.  They were always delicious, but wouldn't they be better with some sprinkles?  We thought so, so we started bringing our own containers of sprinkles to the drive thru with us.

We would pull into a parking space and dip our cones into the rainbow goodness.  The sprinkles did spice up the otherwise plain vanilla ice cream, but the laughter at our own absurdity was what really sprinkled the extra fun on those memories.

When I was struggling through my senior thesis in college, my mom sent me a care package, and I can't really remember anything that was in it except for the container of rainbow sprinkles marked, "Just in case."  Just the sight of those colorful specks of sugar and the meaning behind the small gift was enough to cheer me up.

I didn't think to use them though until one day when I knew I would need an extra boost of something to get through a long day of classes and work.  I was about to brew my daily coffee when I heard my mom's voice in my head saying, "Sprinkles make everything better."  Laughing at my absurdity, I decided to grind up some sprinkles with my coffee beans.

As the coffee brewed, I half-hoped that the rainbow sprinkles would somehow change the color of the coffee, but of course they didn't.  I thought I detected a slight extra bit of sweetness, but I'm pretty sure it was my imagination.  The placebo effect worked though.  I put the coffee in a travel mug and giggled all the way to class, just knowing that there were sprinkles in my coffee.  It was a little thing, but it brought me comfort and joy.

That's what I aimed to do with this blog from the beginning, to find the beauty in the little, ordinary things of every day, to add a little color to the things that are otherwise gray or dull.  Over the years, it has evolved into spiritual and personal reflections and ramblings, and more recently, experiments in all things coffee.

I have enjoyed writing all of it, but recently while I experimented with delicious coffees that I discovered from other companies across the country, a sad container of old, ordinary, just-okay coffee beans sat with its future undetermined.  I knew I couldn't waste it, but I couldn't drink it by itself either.  With the help of a coffee shop I discovered on Instagram, the idea of how to add something extra to this ordinary coffee began brewing in my head.

On Instagram, I stumbled on Vagabond Coffee in Jacksonville, Florida.  They make their own gourmet pop-tarts (they make their own pop-tarts!) AND they have sprinkle Fridays.  That's right, on Fridays they post pictures of delicious looking pop-tarts and lattes sprinkled with rainbow sprinkles.  And the cherry on top of all these sprinkles?  My mom was born in Jacksonville!  Apparently the soul of that place has sprinkles in it, and sprinkles are therefore in my blood.  Now I have a huge coffee crush on this coffee shop and cannot wait to (hopefully) go there with my mom when we go to the Jacksonville/St. Augustine area for a family reunion next summer.

Until then, I will have to make my own sprinkle coffee experience, hence, my solution for these ordinary coffee beans.  Since I work as a barista, I typically drink high quality coffee, and the thought of tainting that delicious black coffee with sprinkles has been far from my mind, though I do add them to my lattes on special occasions.  One thing I have absolutely never done is add them to cold brew. . . SO for the (name)sake of this blog, I owe it to you, to my mom, to myself to at least experiment with sprinkles in my cold brew coffee.  Just for fun.

And honestly, I had more fun taking pictures of the project than anything, but here we go!

Sprinkles, coffee, sunshine, an adorable hedgehog mug, and an adorable mug and saucer in my favorite color from one of my dearly beloved coffee friends

= HAPPY

The sprinkles and the beans.

The sprinkles and the beans ground together.

I added a total of about 2.5 tablespoons of rainbow sprinkles to 1 cup of beans and ground them together on the coarsest setting for cold brew.  I then added an extra .5 tablespoons of whole sprinkles to the grounds JUST FOR FUN.  If we were going for taste, that was WAY too many sprinkles, considering the fact that they are almost purely sugar but I was having too much fun taking pictures, and a single tablespoon would not have been enough fun to photograph.

Above left is all the sprinkles and coffee ground together with that extra splash of sprinkles.  How fun does that look?!  Above right is everything mixed together with 3.5 cups of water.

I definitely used a nut milk bag AND a strainer to filter this out.

The remnant sprinkly grounds.

Like I said, all the sugar made the cold brew way too sweet for me to drink more than half of a cup.  I added my cashew & brazil nut milk and it tasted like sweet cream with a coffee aftertaste.  Too sweet for my blood, but that sweetness may be just what some of you want in your coffee.  If you're feeling adventurous or have some bleh coffee you need to spice up, try adding sprinkles (and let me know how it goes)!

If nothing else, I guarantee you'll have fun and the absurdity will leave you laughing, which is always good for the soul!

Happy brewing!

Fall in Love

I am that girl.

I didn't always love fall.  In fact, I used to hate it.  It was that gray, rainy season full of muddy walks to school and wet, slimy leaves sticking to my shoes. It was brown, and it required raking, which required being outside--I used to hate being outside.  Worst of all, fall held nothing to look forward to except colder and colder mornings and cars covered in frost and ice.  So much ice.

When I was a sophomore in college, everything changed.

It wasn't because I discovered pumpkin spice lattes, or cardigans, or scarves.  And I definitely hadn't gotten excited about the impending death of everything in nature.  No, it had been a combination of graces that led me to change my mind about the season one day.

It had been a mild fall, so the day wasn't terribly chilly.  Dark clouds had begun to roll in to contrast the morning sunshine.  A great breeze picked up and it was as if the sun-kissed trees were waving me on.  I felt the Spirit moving around me and I breathed deeply, and I knew that I love fall.

That semester had followed a dark, depressing summer for me.  I was struggling to adjust back to life at school, to become more financially independent, and to make new friends (some of my best friends from my freshman year were studying in Austria for the semester).  

One Monday night, I wanted desperately to just sit in my dorm room and feel sorry for myself, but some friends invited me to go bowling with a big group of people.  At first I declined.  I'm awkward around people I don't know well, and in my emotional state, I wasn't sure I'd be able to choke up the energy.

As I sat in my room I realized that I had a choice.  I didn't have to let my depression weigh me down.  I could stay there and sink further into my depression, or I could get up and go and maybe have a good time.  Besides, if I went and it was awful, I never had to go again.  Suddenly, there was a strength inside of me (the Holy Spirit, I'm sure), determinedly pushing me to my feet.  I would not let the depression win!

I had no idea that the people I would meet that night would change me forever. It became a weekly tradition--Monday night bowling followed by either Tim Horton's or Taco Bell and/or a movie at someone's house or a random dance party in a parking lot on campus.  We would always meet in the cafeteria for lunch and dinner, taking over two long tables with our laughter and conversation, sitting for hours in that gross building because we were having such a good time.  We were an eclectic group, but for the first time in my life, I felt like I had found friends with whom I really belonged.  I'd had good friends growing up, but never one solid group with similar beliefs and interests.  These people became like a family to me.  Through them, the Lord pulled me out of my depression and showed me who I am--a loved young woman.

That fall, I learned agape.

What followed was the opening of my heart to the Lord.  I gave Him everything, and the next year was the best of my life.  It was challenging and full and colorful and I thought I fell in love so many times but it was really just once--one long plunge into the ocean of Mercy.  At times it was dark and painful and sometimes so lonely I couldn't breathe, but my tears of sorrow always became tears of thanksgiving.

The following fall I was in Austria, where I fell head over heals in love with Jesus and His Mother--I heard God better in Europe for some reason.  Maybe because I lived here:

Yeah, that definitely helped.  It helped me get through the coming year of uncertainties and separation and certainties and alienation.  More pain followed me through the year and pressed on more intensely in the fall of my senior year, and in the pain I discovered real strength--reliance on God.

Strength isn't independence.  It's dependence on God.  That's a lesson I still learn every day.  It's a lesson I finally put into practice two falls later when my heart was lonely, but I placed my trust in God and His perfect timing.  The next week a young man bought me dinner, and we fell in love.  The next fall, our love only grew stronger.

And this year I hear so many people complain about fall and how it's so cold and rainy and gross and everything dies and winter is coming and that means snow and ice and cold.

And all I have to say about that is NOT "pumpkin spice latte pumpkin spice latte pumpkin spice latte" but agape. 

Agape.  The love God has for us.  The love we have for God.  The love we have for one another.  The love. There is so much love in the club!

It's what I think about when I think about fall.  It's what I remember when I wake up at 4:30 and suddenly it's 7 am and the sun still isn't shining.  I think about evenings in the cafeteria and the smokey bowling alley with the people who changed my life forever.  I think of the place of incredible beauty, the place of terrible pain, the place of love lost and love found, the place of death turned new life.

This love is available to all of us, all the time, and we have a choice--to love or to hate, to let ourselves be loved or to let our lives weigh us down, to hide from the world or face the rain with a smile and a heart full of gratitude.

Fall may be the season when everything dies, but life always goes on and starts anew.  And through all the ups and downs, we get by with a little help from our friends.

Thank You, God, for mine.

A Simple Moment of Beauty

My whole world was changing.  I had crossed the state of Ohio to go to college--my first experience branching out into the great unknown.  I loved it, but I was beginning to question everything--who I was, where I came from.  Everything I'd always been so sure of seemed to be shaking uncontrollably beneath my feet.

I was hurrying upstairs to my room one day (I lived on the fourth floor of the dorm building, and those endless stairs thankfully helped stave off the freshman fifteen.  However, moving down to the first floor the next year resulted in sophomore seventeen) when I saw it through the window on the fourth floor landing.  I laughed but didn't quite register what I'd seen.  I stopped halfway to my room, and doubled back for a second look to be sure I hadn't imagined it. Nope.  There it was.  I walked closer to the window and took in the scene.

There at the edge of campus on the old golf course past the rugby fields and the water tower, stood a line of trees bare in the dead of winter, and in the middle of them stood a lone evergreen, slanting slightly to the right, holding its ground in stable instability.

It made my day.  I laughed about it and showed my friends and they appreciated it, but didn't seem to understand why I thought it was so funny.  I'm not entirely sure either, but it reminded me of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree ("It really isn't such a bad little tree. . . it just needs a little love."), and it reminded me of myself a little bit, but mostly, it just made me happy.  I was struck by the simple beauty of its nonchalant absurdity.

Eventually, at the end of my sophomore year, I took some friends on an adventure to meet "my" tree.  I had been nervous about going up there, afraid I wouldn't be able to find it, or that it wouldn't be as great in real life as it was from afar.

It was, though.  It was wonderful.  I gave it a hug (yes, I am a real life tree-hugger) and explored the field where it lived, vowing to come back and visit.  It was another year before I made the trip again, but it became a place of refuge, a place of peace, almost as dear to me as the Port (the Portiuncula chapel on campus modeled after St. Francis of Assisi's church where perpetual Eucharistic adoration goes on throughout the school year 24/7).  The tree had become a symbol of hope for me, a friend to keep me sane, a constant source of joy.

I am so thankful for the "friend" that tree has been to me.  It can't speak, and no I don't think trees have feelings, but I believe God uses such seemingly insignificant things as trees to speak to us, to show us His love for us.

I've had several different trees in my life that stood as such reminders of God's enduring love, like the giant pin oak in our front yard that sang me to sleep with breezy lullabies (until it was struck by lightning for the second time and we had to cut it down), or the umbrella-shaped flowering dogwood in our neighbor's yard that bloomed white and snowed petals in August (until they cut it down).

I do worry about my tree.  As campus continues to grow, I am fearful that one day I'll return to campus and my tree won't be there.  To help immortalize it, last year for Christmas my boyfriend had an artist friend of his paint my tree with me sitting underneath it reading a book.  There aren't words to describe how much that meant to me.  Last week, my boyfriend finally got to come with me to meet my tree.  There aren't words to describe how much that meant to me.

I could go on and on about the way God speaks to us through trees and the beauty of His creation, but I'll finish by telling you about a movie.  This past Christmas, my aunt and I discovered a delightfully sweet movie called The Christmas Tree about a nun who has befriended a Norwegian spruce.  I love the story for many reasons (I mean, it's about a nun and a pine tree--a few of my favorite things!), but mostly because I relate so much to the simple spirituality of the nun, the way a lost love led her to find God at her center, and her quirky relationship to the tree.  The movie ends with her saying:  "That's what a tree is, a simple moment of beauty."

This is my simple moment of beauty.

See You In The Eucharist

It was my first road trip in My Little Red Car, and I was itching to escape Ohio.

I headed North and wondered again why it is that the sky seems so much closer in Michigan than it does in Ohio.  The countryside I fell in love with a few years ago--the green and gold and blue that stretched forever, dotted by red barns and silver silos and fluffy white clouds so close it seemed you could touch them--was less romantic this time around, more worn, yet still just as loved.  Nothing had changed but me.

In Michigan and Illinois, I explored small towns and churches and coffee shops--Ugly Mugs and Cheeky Monkeys and All Chocolate Kitchens--with some of my best friends.  We talked and laughed and my heart healed from all the time in-between our last goodbye and this hello.

The goodbyes came around again, like they always do, and  most of us didn't know when the next time we'd say hello would be.  The last goodbye was to a dear friend after morning Mass, and then I hit the road home.

It was a long road, full of traffic and construction (and a really slow Megabus hogging the left lane for way too long).  But the sun was shining and the trees were swaying and I stopped at Fair Oaks Farm in somewhere, Indiana just because their advertisement "dairy-ed" me.  And then they "double dairy-ed" me.  I can't resist a good play on words, or a latte made with super-fresh whole milk, or cows.

I let the joy and laughter and memories of the weekend follow me home.  I was so thankful for my adventure, and so glad to be back.

I can't help but wonder again at how different it is, those three or four or five years of life at college compared to the rest of our lives. How unfair it all seems that the people we grow and experience so much with suddenly aren't there anymore, at least not as often.  Still, I hold these people in my heart--anyone I have ever loved or have ever come across, I hold them in my heart.

When I went to Mass the day after I came home, and my heart was bursting with thanks for the last few days and for the re-connections it had made, I felt my friends with me, and it's no surprise really.

My household sisters say goodbye with the phrase "I'll see you in the Eucharist."  And it's true.  When we participate in Mass, we participate in the heavenly feast, with all the angels and saints and souls.  When we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, we receive His whole Body.  We are the Body, and so we receive one another.  The love that binds us--Love Itself--is there on the altar, ours for the taking, for the receiving for the giving.  When we receive Communion, we are in communion.

So, though I miss you all, my dear friends, I will see you in the Eucharist.

Surprised By Joy

[*Disclaimer*  The title of this post is also the title of a book by C.S. Lewis that I have neither read nor know much about.  I just like the way it sounds.]

Exactly two years ago today I left my college town as a post-grad nomad. . .I had big dreams in my heart as I drove away from that smelly old mining town rusting along the Ohio River.  I can tell you that none of those dreams came true, and the funny thing that I never even thought I would say is, I'm so thankful they didn't.  

After eighteen years as a student who (NerdAlert) loved school, I'm still just not really sure what else to do, other than make coffee.  When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I said I wanted to be a ballerina (I never took a single lesson) or an actress (I have terrible stage fright, and though I find theater fun, I never found it very fulfilling) or the president (but only so I could outlaw abortion and then hang out in the White House).  

My concept of reality wasn't very realistic.  Still isn't, actually.  If you had told me then that I would be where I am today, though. . .I don't know what I would have done, but I'm glad you didn't.  It's been a struggle to get here, but I've enjoyed watching the mystery unfold.  I can't say that I wouldn't like to change a few things, but without those particular causes for suffering, I wouldn't have also found a particular cause for joy.

Reality has a way of checking itself, and it seems to do this in waves for me.  Often when I find my brain about to explode from the pressure of it all, I am surprised by this unique joy (a happiness I really never thought I could feel), and all the overwhelming thoughts weighing me down lose their heaviness.  They take on color and fire and become like rainbow confetti.  Then I welcome the explosion, because that means it's time to party.