“I love the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans.  It smells like novels waiting to be written; the promise of a paragraph paused mid sentence or sip.”

These are the words that fall from my lips as I sip a very satisfying cup of café con leche while sitting comfortably in the living room with my parents.  We sit together, each wrapped snugly in our bathrobes, slipper-shod and sharing our stories while coaxing ourselves awake, sip by sip.

It’s early Saturday morning in central Florida and the sun is already shining here in the Sunshine State as a light breeze moves the palm fronds roughly against the thin glass windows of their second story apartment.  I sit beside the open glass door that leads out to the lanai overlooking a large live oak tree that provides just enough privacy from the golf course and greenery behind us.

At the base of the live oak tree there appears, every morning, a small pile of grain (yellow in color, perhaps corn) upon which several variety of birds and small wildlife share in feasting.  Today’s gathering of creatures included mourning doves, blue jays, a downy woodpecker, squirrel, a lizard or two and three large birds of nearly three feet high known as Sandhill Cranes.  These tall gray birds with a bit of red atop their crown pecked at the scattered grain with their long narrow beaks for a time before engaging in an amusing form of avian dance that included hopping up high while alternating their footwork, interspersed with a partial unfolding of their wings and a loud gargled and low toned squawk.

That’s when it strikes me that their ‘song’ is that of my alarm clock back home in Ontario.  I bought it many years ago solely on the promise of waking to beautiful birdsongs.  Only to discover all too late (the next morning) that there were really only two options besides buzzer, some sort of distress call from an unidentifiable bird sending a speedy warning to rise and shine, and that of the Sandhill Crane.  It’s not a lovely sound. It’s one that might make a person wish to hit the snooze button more than once except for the knowledge that you will then have to listen to it all over again precisely nine minutes later.  No snooze button on these Sandhill Cranes.  I’ve been waking with the sunlight and smell of fresh coffee lately.

Sipping my coffee while nestled comfortably in a robins-egg blue suede swivel chair overlooking the pair of large front windows I can see the two house cats sitting on the cool marble sill, one in each window, facing each other like two dark silhouetted book ends.

And I’m glad to be here and not there, wherever that may be.  I’m happy to be me and hope you find your happy place this year.

I’ll be enjoying the view from my window seat down south until March when I’ll enjoy the window seat on my flight back to Ontario, reality, and a Sandhill Crane birdsong alarm clock which wakes me in time to wake him by reaching over to stretch into a snuggle with my arm around my love as he reaches over to hit the snooze button (again).

Until then let’s continue to sip our sunshine every Saturday morning together here on the blog.  Here’s to 2014, the year of God’s goodness!

© Una-Melina // Worthy Books & Things, 2014.