I was cleaning in the kitchen when I noticed that the coffee grinder was still half full of grounds from this morning. There are things that you just take don’t time to do that suddenly open up when you’ve a weekday to yourself. I rummaged around in the cupboard and found my old Turkish espresso maker. A Turkish espresso maker is made of iron. It has a bottom portion that you fill with water and then you insert a little tin inverted funnel through which the steam will rise. You fill the top portion of the funnel with finely ground coffee and then you screw the top portion into place.

I hadn’t used it in so long that the rubber seal that holds a separate circular piece of tin with tiny holes it in place just above the grounds, had become dry and chalky; so I oiled it with olive oil before tightening the top on. The steam enters the upper portion of the pot through a small tube and condenses against the lid with a rushing percolating sound. You place the pot over the gas burner on high and wait the few minutes it takes to make a few small cups and then sip your next half hour away with sugar and a lemon rind stirred gently in.

I am gradually getting used to being mostly by myself. My onetime daily backlog of forty plus emails has dwindled to six or so correspondences. My phone rings occasionally but I have given up answering the landline. If you call, leave a message and I’ll call you back when I’m at a stopping point. I’m usually upstairs writing where there is no phone and I don’t generally have a strong desire to break my train of thought to run downstairs to talk to a probable telemarketer. The “inner circle” generally calls the cell phone, but I often turn that off during the day as well.

This isn’t my first hibernation. During my last year with Melinda, and during the nine months that followed, I let my contacts dwindle through the winter to a very small group of people. I hadn’t noticed my withdrawal until my friend Chris pointed out that he hadn’t seen me outside of my apartment in months. It’s not that I wasn’t leaving I had just given up on the social portion of my existence. When I let my interior life grow wild, without the constant pruning necessitated by wage slavery, I move toward a silence in action that derives great pleasure from slowly pulling the rubber seal from a Turkish coffee maker. I cultivate a kind of slowness that busier versions of myself would just assume forget is possible. Such calm seas have been rare these past few years and I am breathing easier drifting in this current current.

Meet my nephew Henry, he’s taking things slow as well.