Coffee love notes

Hayden makes me coffee every morning. You probably already knew that - it's one of our Things. We nearly wrote it into our wedding vows ... but stopped short and instead Hayden promised, in writing which he gave me on our wedding night, that he will always make me coffee in the morning.

And he has kept his promise extremely faithfully (he only forgot one time), but when we first arrived in Bunbury we found that we had a problem. I would get up early with Hayden and he would make me coffee, and then he'd leave for work at 6:30am which in July was in complete darkness. So then I would be wide awake full of coffee beans, with a long day stretching before me filled with nothing. After all the fun we had in New Zealand, life in Bunbury was depressing.

Hayden's lovely solution was to let me sleep in a bit longer each day while he crept about in silence and darkness getting ready for work. He would then prepare the coffee and leave it sitting on the stove all ready to cook. I would wake up later to a lovely coffee, topped off with a note from Hayden, carefully written and tucked into the top of the coffee maker. Not quite as nice as spending the morning together, but better on the whole for me during that difficult time.

These days things are much better. It's lighter in the mornings for one thing and my days are much happier, so I often make it up in the morning to have breakfast with Hayden (plus we live much closer to his work now, so he leaves later). We have solved our little problems one by one and we are now quite contentedly taking each Spring day at a time. I have decided to stop trying to tell myself (and you) that we have 'settled in' here in Bunbury because truthfully we don't feel that we want to stay here long. But you never know, that might later change.

This morning I was cleaning up near the stove and I noticed that the pile of morning coffee notes has grown quite tall! I feel a bit silly keeping them, but they remind me how each day has lead to the next, and the next, and how we've walked our way out of the darkness.