Mariposa

This morning in the Twin Cities is bright and crisp. There's a sweet damp scent in the air. It's probably the smell, more than the weather, that triggered a strong memory for me while I was walking to the 2nd Moon Coffee Shop. It was not a particular event, but rather an old routine and place that suddenly came to mind.

The last year I spent in Boston, I worked on Massachusetts Ave several blocks south of Central Square. Central Square was usually bustling when I got there during the peak of the morning rush, throngs of people exiting and entering the T, catching the bus or rushing from their apartment doors down Mass Ave by foot. But especially on cool fall or spring morning, there would be an aura of morning calm, a paradoxical stillness, to all this movement. It was the marriage of chaos and equanimity that you can observe in a shaken snow dome. Walking from the T station to my office, I would always pass a coffee shop called Mariposa and look in longingly at its denizens reading morning papers and conversing. It wasn't an addiction to coffee or a dread of work, but the idea of the pleasure to be had spending a morning in the world of journalism or books at a coffee shop that filled me with yearning. A few mornings I would be able to rouse myself from bed early enough to spend an hour or so at Mariposa before I had to be at work. I love sleep and I always love it most just as it is ending, so it was only on the most glorious mornings when I was willing to make the trade-off of sleep for coffee shopping. But when I did, the pleasure I had fantasized about on my rushed walks to work proved to be not just an illusion. As I wrote in my journal on those special mornings, I'd be able to see, temporally, the chaos of my anxieties in that beautiful morning light, fluttering with the graceful disorder of butterflies in an atrium.