A Key West Concoction - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alyson Matley has worked as both a staff and freelance writer since 1987. Her work has been recognized with awards from Rolling Stone Magazine, the Oregon Newspaper Publishers' Association, Writer's Digest, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Currently she is the Key West Bureau Chief for the Keynoter, a sister publication to the Miami Herald. In 1993 she founded a local literary magazine, and has worked in both television and radio.

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The air in Key West has become humid and still. It washes your skin like hot honey and glues your shirt to your back. Through the open window of my favorite tiny Cuban café that air is hotter, thicker, spiced with the incongruous scents of hot coffee, frying eggs, and fabric softener.

Despite the heat, locals line the walk-up window for their daily fix of Cuban toast, a tall creamy con leche, or a quick jolt of bucci. Some sit in the adjacent laundry and chat, styrofoam cups in hand. Others hustle off in cars or on bikes, balancing their cup of the island's best coffee as if it were more precious that its 75-cent price tag.

This island is flavored by its coffee and the people who make it. Their day begins well before dawn, and by 5 am the biting fragrance of the coffee is mingling with the last vestiges of night-blooming jasmine. White Street comes slowly to life with forms shuffling toward some half-remembered elixir, the renewal of life on this island. By the time daylight washes the busy corner, Cuban toast and con leche have nourished an entire workforce.

Others, though, linger, talking, or just watching life unfold from their bucci-induced trance. Life unfolds in a microcosm outside the cafe. Two people who have come and gone for months maybe years just ten minutes apart, one morning arrive as lovers, kissing fleetingly over steaming styrofoam. The little man who seemed to grow more frail by the week, but who came nonetheless year in and year out, one day is not there to order his bucci and smoke a fat, fragrant cigar.

Quarrels are had, plans made, dreams lost, friends found, all in the simple context of a cup of coffee and cheese bread wrapped in paper.