Coffee, a spooky show and Narnia

It had been awhile.

Not from coffee, never from coffee. But from this. From sitting down in the quiet of a Saturday morning and letting Coffee & Words find me again instead of the other way around.

I had discovered a comical, spooky series on Apple TV called “Widow’s Bay” and spent the morning all caught up, waiting until Wednesday for more episodes. Probably a good thing. I would have binged the whole season otherwise.

By late morning I was exactly where I needed to be: cozy spot, smooth jazz, cats nearby, coffee in hand. Sacred Saturday. Untouched.

I needed to stop around noon to pick up keys to the storage closet right across the hall from my apartment. I had been asking about it for almost a year. Forty dollars a month for a space I could finally breathe into.

We needed it. Zach and I had just returned from Indiana a few weeks earlier, a trip that was equal parts exhausting, emotional and fun. We drove a UHaul while Lexi and her Quin drove her Traverse. We broke up the hard work and the long drive home with a two-day, three-night detour to Pigeon Forge. A vacation inside a mission. We laughed, we ate, we exhaled.

We also brought home everything.

The spare bedroom had become what Zach and I started calling Narnia. Every tub, every box, every piece of memory that traveled from my parents’ home in Muncie, Indiana, to Amelia Island, Florida. My mother’s percolator. My parents’ stereo console, a beautiful piece of furniture with a stack of their favorite records still sitting on the spindle, ready to drop one after another, as if the house had simply paused and no one told them yet.

It took me a solid week to recover from the trip. Mentally and physically. And then quietly, in the weeks that followed, I felt something shift.

Coffee & Words started calling me back.

I have been thinking a lot about the difference between building something out of desperation and building something out of desire.

Coffee & Words was never born from survival. It arrived on a January morning as a vision, clear, creative, entirely its own. But there came a time when financial pressure crept in and I tried to push it, rush it, make it become something useful fast enough to help pay rent. Every time I did, it faltered. It could not be forced into that shape. It was never meant to be.

That pressure is lifting now. Slowly, the way mornings get lighter in spring before you notice it has happened. And in that new space, something surprising is emerging.

Not urgency. Clarity.

I am settling into a season where I can simply work and live. Where I do not have to push and hustle and force. Where Coffee & Words does not have to be a rescue plan. It can just be what it always was at its core: a story. My story. Written in real time, for my children, so they can know who I was becoming while I am still here to write it.

That is not a business model. That is a calling.

Three words found me on that Saturday morning while I was sitting with my coffee and my thoughts.

Beckoning. Coffee & Words has never let me wander too far. It has always been there at the edge of my quiet mornings, patient, waiting. Beckoning me back.

Threshold. That is what Narnia feels like every time I open the door. Not a storage room. A threshold between what was packed away and what gets to live again. My mother’s things. My father’s things. The records on the spindle. The percolator. The cedar hope chest I now have that was my mother’s, and that I am filling with intention for the day my own children open it and find pieces of me waiting inside.

Tending. This is what my brother and I are doing with the memories of our parents’ lives. Not preserving them behind glass. Tending them. The way you tend a garden. Carefully. With love. Knowing that something alive needs care to keep growing.

My brother has his genealogy room. I have Coffee & Words.

Two siblings, two different ways of tending the same garden.

I found something else that morning, buried at the end of a Google Drive entry I wrote the Monday after I resigned from the N-L years ago.

“This is what the Lord says: Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your soul.” Jeremiah 6:16

I had written it down at one of the biggest pivots of my professional life. And there it was, waiting in a document I had not opened in years, on the morning I was describing a shift I could feel but not yet name.

The ancient paths. The percolator. The records on the spindle. The photo albums in Narnia. My mother’s legacy, not in a hope chest, but in every room of every home she ever kept. In the furniture she and my father carried from their very first home together all the way to the last. Her legacy was lived in. Mine is being written down.

I am the bridge between the two.

By noon I had the key to the storage closet.

Some Saturdays are just Saturdays. Coffee and a good show and a few small errands.

And some Saturdays are a threshold.

This was one of those.

Beckoning. Threshold. Tending.

I did not know those were my words when the morning began. I know it now.

And somewhere across the hall, in a storage closet on Amelia Island, a percolator and a stack of records are waiting to tell their stories.

I will get to them. I will get to all of it.

I am home.

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My word stack for today:

Beckoning + Threshold + Tending

Beckoning [bek-uh-ning] verb/adjective | Origin: Old English bēcnan, to signal, to summon with a gesture The quiet pull toward something that knows you better than you know yourself, patient enough to wait until you’re ready.

Threshold [thresh-hohld] noun | Origin: Old English therscold, the place you cross to enter The sacred pause between what was and what will be, where every ending and every beginning share the same breath.

Tending [ten-ding] verb | Origin: Old English tendan, to attend to, to care for The slow, deliberate act of keeping something alive not by fixing or forcing but simply by showing up with love.

These mugs are part of our Coffee Stories collection — word stacks inspired by my personal journey shared in these posts. Each memoir piece becomes a stackable memory you can hold in your hands. Start your own collection and create combinations that speak to your journey.