Of Hershey Kisses and Percolated Coffee

How coffee and chocolate helps me to mourn--and feel connected to--my late grandmother.

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There’s nothing quite like the smell of percolated coffee. I’ve been a coffee addict for almost a decade now, and I’ve tried almost every brewing method you can imagine–drip, cold brew, Keurig (don’t hate me)--but recently I’ve turned to one of the simplest methods: the old-fashioned stovetop percolator. Part of my preference has to do with the taste. Percolated coffee has a really lovely flavor, one that jumps right out at you as soon as those first few drops touch your tongue. It also has a higher caffeine content which, for a caffeine addict like me, is definitely a major selling point. 

However, there’s another reason that I’ve turned to this particular method. For me, it’s a means of connecting with my late grandmother who, for most of her life, used one such percolator (as one would expect of a farmwife who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s). It now sits in my parents’ kitchen, and my dad always makes me a pot of percolated coffee whenever I come home. Every time he does so, it brings my grandmother back into our lives for just a few minutes. 

When I take a sip of that freshly-percolated coffee, it takes me back to winter nights when my grandmother would host card game nights with her brother and sister-in-law. They’d all gather around her dining room table and talk up a storm while playing some mysterious game I believe was called “Oh Shit” (though of course my grandmother referred to it primly as “Oh Shoot”). I only rarely partook of either the coffee or the cards, mostly because I was too young. However, on the rare occasions that I did so I remember thinking about how delicious and savory the coffee was, and I also remember the moment when I finally got to play cards, at last feeling like one of the grownups.

Just one sip of that coffee brings back a whole host of other memories. Of grandma baking her special pinwheel cookies, which she would keep in an old tupperware container, a slice of bread tucked inside to keep them fresh. I remember her making me sour milk pancakes of a Saturday morning, the smell of the batter blending with the coffee percolating on the stove. I remember the smell of autumn lives, which my grandfather would dutifully rake into a pile so that I could jump into them. I remember grandma pretending to be the grandmother in our little re-enactments of Little Red Riding Hood while I, the ravenous wolf, would chase her around the house. I remember walking to the top of the hill with her, while my aunt struggled to keep up.

It’s funny just how many memories can be contained in something so simple as a cup of coffee, isn’t it? And it’s not just the coffee itself. It’s the very act of filling up that little metal pot and putting it on the stove. It’s the smell as it begins to perk, filling the kitchen with that distinct scent. It’s the feeling of the old glass ceramic mugs that my grandmother used for years (and years, and years) and which have now passed into my care. It’s all of these things and more, all the little sensory details that call up an entire vanished world, the shade of a person no longer here. 

It’s no secret that the past three years have been very difficult for me. I lost my grandmother to COVID in December of 2020, on this very day, in fact. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it felt like the sky fell on me that day, when my mom called to tell me the news that grandma was no longer with us. It’s a loss that left a hole in my heart that has never entirely healed. Even now, there are moments when the grief hits me like a knife in the heart. I can be standing at the sink and something will randomly remind me of her, and it’s as if I’ve lost her all over again. To sort-of quote Blanche Devereaux, it dawns on me that she’s really gone. 

Perhaps I wouldn’t feel quite the same echoing sense of loss if I’d been able to be with my grandmother when she passed, but COVID restrictions meant I wasn’t able to say goodbye in person. Instead, I had to rely on Zoom which, though better than nothing, is in no way a replacement for being in the same physical space as your loved one when they leave this life. I am fortunate that I have as many little reminders of her as I do, that I’m able to drink percolated coffee and that her mugs are now in my custody, little orange reminders of the little old lady who is no longer here. 

Sometimes, it turns out, a cup of coffee isn’t just a cup of coffee. Instead, it’s a way of connecting with someone that you’ve loved and lost, a bit of material reality that conjures up the many happy memories that you shared together. Taste, like smell, seems to have an almost transportive quality, erasing–if only for a split second–the seemingly unbridgeable gulf that exists between the us-as-we-are-now from the us-as-we-were-then. As I savor the bold flavor of a cup of percolated coffee, I’m suddenly back on those winter nights in my grandmother’s rambling farmhouse, surrounded by light and love and joy.

This weekend I plan on making some peanut butter blossoms, my choice as the absolute best of holiday cookies. There was a time not long ago when doing so would have been difficult, as they require Hershey kisses, and if there was one candy my grandmother loved more than anything else, it was those. Even when, late in her life, she would barely eat anything else, I could always count on her eating at least a dozen Hershey kisses, and I patiently unwrapped them for her. For a while after she died I could barely look at them, let alone eat them, without feeling the fierce ache of loss.

Now, though, I can eat them in her memory. Like the percolated coffee, they’re a tangible (and tasty) reminder of the pleasures my grandma and I used to share. Though she is gone, her memories remain, and for that I will always be grateful.