Scenes from a Coffee Shop

Izzy and I are no strangers to coffee shops. Most mornings we go over to see Kit and Carol at Coffee Cats in downtown Taos. For three years we’ve been sitting at the same blue table, on the same white bench, gazing out the same glass windows over the same trees, sometimes green and pliant, sometimes yellow and quivering, sometimes bare and achingly still. Those trees, we know them from root to branch as they converse with us on the wind through the open window. Izzy lifts her head to sniff out tidings carried on the breeze: of sap and soil, petals falling, bird nest weaving, squirrel games of hide and seek, ant parades.

I order a latte for me and a little dish of water for her. I sit. I write. Or I try to. As Izzy listens to the leaves and reads the wind’s tree mail, she moves from dog bed to table to bench, to get closer to the window. She leans into my lap for a lick of whipped cream. She kisses my face. She lays across my journal. She sits on my laptop. When I relocate her back to her own chair, she’ll take a nap, or, if she’s not sleepy, fake me out with semi-asleep poses designed for maximum cute-overload attack, hoping to seduce me away from my writing.

Pretty much every morning, it works. I put the pen down. I pick the chihuahua up. Until recently…I’ve started picking up the camera so you can see what I see.

This is a first in a series entitled Scenes From a Coffee Shop

Scenes from a Coffee Shop Volume 1