A hot coffee to remind me.

I grew up in the state of Táchira, a coffee producing region in the west of my country. Here children drink coffee since before leaving the bottle, so like all children in the territory I grew up drinking my cup of hot coffee every morning to accompany breakfast. One of the popular beliefs is that coffee is addictive and harmful for the children, so some Andean mothers are self-deceived by preparing coffee with milk instead of black coffee for the little ones of the house.

A traditional coffee, brewed in an aluminum pot, aromatized the mornings of my childhood, my mother's voice announcing breakfast gave its own sound to the first coffee memories that I reproduced for a long time. That is how an imaginary related to the hot coffee of every day was installed in my identity from very early on.

At the age of 18 I had a gall bladder operation, I was very delicate before the operation. At that time I still drank coffee with milk as a way of reaffirming that I was the girl of the house. But the day after the operation, my mother brought me to the stretcher a croissant and my respective cup of coffee with milk, the surprise was that after a few sips I threw up all the coffee and what I had eaten of bread, that experience made me hate coffee for a long time, just smelling it caused me the same nausea of that time.

Losing my love for coffee for so many years also made me lose part of the sensory memory that I had developed thanks to it. Over the years I became reconciled with the aroma, especially because I never stopped having direct contact with coffee, it is culturally impossible, at home there was always the greca and the coffee to offer to visitors, family and friends, as a liquid token of affection.

One day I realized that the smell of coffee no longer made me nauseous, and I began to consume it through my sense of smell.In this way I was recovering again the memories related to coffee. Now I can not miss the hot coffee every morning, as an ancestral ritual that goes back three generations, when my great-grandfather owned one of the best-selling coffee factories in Colombia.

I have never tried iced coffee, although now I have resumed my coffee drinking habits, I live in a very small town, in a rural area far from everything, here there are no coffee shops. When you go out for a coffee it is surely at a friend's or neighbor's house, where as tradition dictates a cup of coffee is always offered to visitors.

Maybe one day I will try iced coffee, but without a doubt hot coffee is not only my favorite drink, it also forms part of my identity, of my memory and culture and that is something that has no comparison.A memory that tastes, smells, grows every day in our fields and waves in the middle stripe of the Táchira state flag.