I’ve loved coffee ever since my grandfather let me sip his sweet, milky rendition on Sundays after church when I was a toddler. More than forty years later, I can still picture myself on his lap at the dining room table after a big Sunday dinner, feeling the joy and privilege of sharing his coffee. The coffee tasted so good, but more than that, it bonded us. I think that’s why it still feels so deeply ingrained in me. Grandpa remains front and center, too, thanks to the joke that I’m very short because the coffee he gave me at such a young age stunted my growth. Whenever my height comes up, I just say endearingly, “blame Grandpa.”

Coffee has been personal to me from a very young age, but it’s also something much larger in the world’s culture. Starbucks has been in the news: restructuring, laying off 900 people, and closing 1% of its North American stores. I barely paid attention until I saw that the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Seattle had closed permanently.

Starbucks Reserve Roastery Capitol Hill Seattle

In contrast to those modest cups with Grandpa, this was the most extravagant coffee shop I’d ever seen.

Even the door was fancy

I was lucky enough to visit several times on different trips to Seattle, and each time I felt like I’d stepped into coffee heaven: sparkly copper equipment, pastries that could have come from Paris, fancy coffee cocktails, exclusive coffee concoctions, and coffee-themed merchandise that spoke directly to me. The next time I go to Seattle, I will really miss going to that magical place.

Coffee cocktail at Starbucks Reserve Roastery Seattle

Coffee is offering magic to me in other ways, though. In just over a week, I’ll be in Istanbul, tasting Turkish coffee in Turkey for the first time. An old friend’s advice about Istanbul was about coffee, “Just remember…don’t stir the Turkish coffee.” That friend is someone I recently reconnected with, a reconnection that only happened because we lost a mutual friend, who I also hold coffee memories with. Coffee connects.

This year, it feels important to honor how coffee carries us through beginnings, endings, and reconnections. It connects us to memories, to people we love, to the ones we’ve lost, to those who return to us, and to people and places we haven’t found yet.

In a fractured and splintered world, coffee is a thread of humanity, even though it’s always a little different everywhere you go, just like people. So today raise a cup to the past, to what has endured, to what has returned, and to what’s still waiting for us.