Who needs alarms?

The sun didn’t wake me this morning, nor did the trashmen nor the street cleaners. It wasn’t the children’s voices as they took a few minutes to play before trudging off to school with their backpacks filled with books.

Coffee woke me, its aroma crossing the street from where Ingoldt and Keega were sitting in their kitchen. Like some cartoon, the smell of the freshly brewed coffee wafted from their second floor window into my third floor window, made its way across the floor and entered my nostrils.
I don’t drink coffee, except for an occasional renversée, the Genevoise answer to café au lait. When I do savour the aroma and taste of anything but heavily milk-diluted coffee, ants enter the top of my head and tap dance. It isn’t the caffeine, for I can consume large quantities of tea and my beloved Coca-Cola without problems.

Sometimes I give in to the renversée like the time I met my writing mate at the Ferney marché and the only thing to do was to sit in the sun at a café and drink a coffee. Nothing else would have been the same. And the amount of frothed milk kept the ants at bay.
Sadly the same day, I had bought flowers for the Madame S., the octogenarian lady who lived on the ninth floor of my apartment building. She was so pleased she had to make me espresso despite my protests and then my best attempts to sip as little possible. She kept filling the delicate gold rimmed demitasse almost after each of my tiny swallows. I returned to my own flat with an colony of ants imitating the entire cast of Riverdance and Lord of the Rings in my skull.
Still not being able to drink coffee does not diminish the pleasure of smelling it brewing this morning. Thank-you Ingoldt and Keega.