A Community Building Concoction, 

how coffee taught me about community. 

My parents, like many exhausted parents, drank coffee every morning and would not let me have it until I was older. However, as a kid, I would ride horses every Wednesday and my mom would get me a frappuccino and her a vanilla latte. 

I had mounds of syrup, chocolate, and whipped cream in my frappe so there were little to no coffee remnants on my tastebuds. 

As I got older, I tried a white chocolate mocha, which I now introduce to first-time coffee drinkers as a barista and it shifted my coffee-drinking experience. I went from a blended sugar-filled disaster to a calm warm, still sugary, mocha. I loved it! I then went to a mocha, a vanilla latte, and so on. 

I blame my mom for the Starbucks addiction that she created.  

It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I would step away from my then-favorite corporation and go to small businesses. 

During my sophomore year of high school, I was told that I would have to move to Knoxville, Tennessee because my dad got a new job. I was heartbroken as I had been living in North Carolina since I was four years old. 

I was distraught and unsure of what the future held, but coffee was there. I know it sounds sad, but I did not rely on the drink in that way. 

Once I moved I had a whole new world given to me. 

I was at a new school, and neighborhood, and especially meeting new people. I had a hard time finding a good group of friends at first and I was consistently taken to new coffee shops to see mutual friends of my family members who lived in Tennessee. 

I was always hesitant to meet new people and I hated change, but once they offered the idea of getting coffee together, I like to think my nerves subsided just a bit. 

I met my best friend, Leah a year later.  

Leah had lived in Knoxville her whole life and she knew all the best places for us to hang out. Starting our senior year we would go to the same coffee shop called Honeybee Coffee Company almost every Wednesday night after school. 

We bonded over coffee, people-watching, and sometimes doing homework instead of chatting. We also started getting coffee at K-Brew with our other friend Emery. Every Saturday we would meet up, get a bagel and coffee, play uno, gossip, cry, or take silly photos. 

It was moments like those that made me realize that coffee was a constant in my life and a true community I was a part of. 

My parents and I bonded over going to a new coffee shop, despite some rocky moments when we first moved to Tennessee. As I went into college I bonded more with them over coffee. When I moved into my dorm and settled into MTSU I met so many people. 

Such as my best friends Shane, an avid black coffee drinker, and Lily, a coffee connoisseur. Lily, who would later be my future roommate, started working at a coffee shop where the rest of our friends would visit her to avoid the sad winter darkness of our freshmen year of college. 

There were so many tears shed over coffee freshman year and many more moments where we would ask each other, “Do you want me to make us some coffee?” which then would follow with a resounding yes.  

I started working as a barista which fueled my love for the drink more.

Community is one of the many things that is important to me and I find that coffee is a great community builder. 

I have met so many people who share my love for this drink. So much in fact that last spring I got a tattoo of a coffee plant. To some, it may sound like an addiction (for the record I can live without coffee) or an odd obsession. 

Rest assured it is not an unhealthy attachment, but rather a fascination for the craft and science of a drink that creates a deeper meaning to the word connection.