Re: Loving It

“Most war-zone correspondents believe they have to be there — for idealistic reasons and personal ones, they are most alive on the edge — and yet it is rare to meet one who doesn’t long for home. In self-defense, they assemble highly personal survival kits: the items they cannot travel without, whether on a short trip or a long one.

That first year, I returned to Kabul in March; it was still bitter cold, but this time I brought real coffee, ground the day I left, a pack of paper filters and a plastic filter holder.

Each morning when I turned on the kettle and listened to its whistle, I heard the whistle of the kettle on my family’s stove in New York and felt the presence of my father, carefully measuring his coffee into his Melitta — enough for two strong cups. One he would drink immediately while still wearing his pajamas and looking at the paper, and the second he would cover with a saucer until he had dressed and drink it before his first patient. (He was a psychiatrist, and the patients started coming at 7 a.m.). As I stood in the morning light in my grimy Kabul kitchen, the hot coffee made me feel almost at home.

I brought, too, Dutch-style unsweetened cocoa, which has a dark-chocolate bitterness. On the coldest winter days, I would pour hot water into a mix of cocoa and milk at the bottom of my cup. A froth would appear briefly on the surface and I would see myself crouching by a small propane stove in the moist green of the mountains of upstate New York, the steam of the cocoa made outdoors mixing with the curls of low-lying clouds drifting through the trees. The first sip of cocoa on winter days in Kabul transported me to that faraway verdancy and was a promise that I would return to the mountains of my childhood summers.”

(Alissa J. Ruben, “Sips of Home, Bites of Memory,” The New York Times, 2/14/12)