A Morning Cup
Ladd’s Addition is the name scrawled across the map where we live. It’s a catacomb of a maze, in Portland’s very much structured, grid-perfect street alignment, it breaks defiant a zig zag weave of diagonal streets flowing into circular roundabouts stuffed full of rose gardens and dotted with a video rental place “i” and crossed by a coffee shop “t”.
My cup of coffee is tall, ceramic and hip like a mug in a place meant to satisfy the middle class denizens which frequent its chess table seating arrangement and soft indie rock atmosphere. A mother with a child is as at home here as a wandering cyclist. Outside, in the roundabout, buses and bikes twist in and out of eachother as naturally as chocolate and vanilla ice cream in a waffle cone. I’m complacently super-satisfied for the moment, bursting with nonchalant and yet oozing steamy up to my eyeballs in the later days adventures. The quiet sounds of the radio mixed with questions from patrons is a solemn backbeat to Olivia’s random outbreaks of immense laughter and the sound of her fork digging into a zucchini breakfast just before my eyes.
Up Next: A Morning Cup: Three Friends