Coffee connects us to the past, even one we’ve never experienced.
It has been over a year since we last walked across the North Ground fields to The Good Earth Café. We had noticed the coffee shop the previous day, when we were walking around town. The fresh faces of the University of Otago students, many of them Asian.
Elsewhere other students were getting drunk; it was St. Patrick’s Day. We heard loud music and hollering and the teamwork of the gangs of housemates carrying cases of beer uphill from the town centre.
They were no doubt sleeping off their hangovers this morning. Fewer faces about, fresh or inebriated.
When we entered the café, we were one of the earliest to arrive. A quiet space, then. A slow brekkie before our drive into the Catlins later that day.
Jars of preserves and jams dotted the sunlit windowsills. Plum jams and sauerkraut relish. Orange, lemon and whiskey marmalade. Tomato, apple and mustard chutney. The flavours enticed, full of possibility.
We needed caffeine, not possibility, however. We craved certainty.
A couple of flat whites, then, to start our day and while we waited for our breakfast. Bacon, bread and fried eggs. What more did we need?
The name of the café, I remarked, reminded me of Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Good Earth. Set in a village in China in the early 20th century, it was about family life and family strife.
I believe the café owners were probably thinking more of their gluten-free, organic menu. Of sustainability and of the environment. Of climate change.
Yet the last couple of sentences of Buck’s novel haunt me still:
And they soothed him and they said over and over, the elder son and the second son,
“Rest assured, our father, rest assured. The land is not to be sold.”
But over the old man’s head they looked at each other and smiled.
Perhaps the names of the book and of the shop refer to the same thing after all.
| The Good Earth Café 765 Cumberland Street, Dunedin, New Zealand facebook.com/goodearthdunedin/ |
