At the Coffee Shop, I Write About Another Coffee Shop

Finding yourself in finding your places

It’s gray here, not too cold, with the smell of potential rain hanging in the air. It feels like Seattle - the sky low and heavy, everything smelling irresistibly fresh and earthy. I never thought I’d grow to like that part of Seattle until a dear friend there told me he had learned to see the gray season as a close, cozy hug. After that, I saw everything differently: the way the clouds closed protectively over the skyscrapers, the way the rain kept everything quiet and still. It was still depressing on some days, but it was sweet and safe and comforting, too. Now, all the feelings of Seattle come back to me on days like this. The unseasonably warm gray comes over Massachusetts and suddenly I’m back on First Hill, peeking down the slope of James Street as Puget Sound becomes the sky.

I think, if you cut me open, you’d find that I’m not much more than an amalgam of places I’ve loved. When I really love a place, I feel like I absorb it. It becomes as true a part of my core as anything else. I am Southern Vermont and Northern Vermont and New York City and San Francisco and France and Seattle and the Cascades. I am, maybe, a person who is always looking to drop anchor. I chase after the feeling of being heart-and-soul connected to somewhere. Sometimes it’s a whole city, but usually it’s a coffeeshop or a corner or a grove of trees or a certain bench in the park where the light hits just so every time. A place where suddenly, for a moment, I feel more like myself than I did before. A place that aligns me.

When I first moved to the West Coast, that place was Joe Bar on Harvard and Roy. I had just blindly moved cross-country with a boyfriend who was dishonest, disloyal, and generally toxic. My mental health was in shambles, and my physical health was teetering. I knew no one in my new neighborhood and I couldn’t see myself anywhere. I was the definition of unmoored. But the first morning, I went out by myself and wandered serendipitously into Joe Bar, a place full of smiling employees who wanted to know my name and story. Outside, bright metal tables - the perfect size for writing alone - balanced on the crooked sidewalk under the dappled shade of an elm tree. Sitting there, watching the unfamiliar world go by, I suddenly saw the possibility of finding home here.

Joe Bar closed a couple of weeks ago, after 25 years of being a safe place for thousands of people to drop anchor in a choppy city. Places like that never really go away. They become part of the people they nurtured. Joe Bar will always remind me of the importance of finding your places wherever you are.

Moving to Massachusetts was an extremely different process. I’m happy and healthy now in a way I wasn’t then. I’m comfortable; I feel safe. I don’t spend my days wandering around alone, looking for places that will help me feel centered. All of this is certainly a net gain - but on mornings like this, I also remember that it’s kept me from doing some of the work of dropping anchor- work that, for me, is essential. I still know other places far better than this one. The stores and restaurants and libraries and park benches here are all other people’s. None of them are part of me.

Yet.

I’ve written a few of these letters in the same place now - a little cafe on Main Street in my new town. Inside, the speakers play music I recognize. There’s no elm tree, but the wifi connection and the espresso are strong. I don’t know the people, but I can tell they’re kind. In the mornings, the sunlight hits the off-white brick outside in a way that feels just a little bit nostalgic - almost as if I’ve been there before.

The process has to start somewhere.

Joe Bar, Seattle, 2017