Coffee Grinder
The grail of the estate sale
My mom loved estate sales.
The bigger the better.
Digging through things that have been dusted off for a second life, a vacuum that has cleaned a thousand miles of floors, a blazer that has covered someone’s shoulders when they walked into an ancient catholic church backpacking through Europe 20 years ago.
Everything organized, labeled and priced to move like a gallery show meticulously curated to resemble a completely ordinary life.
They always made me a little uncomfortable, like you were sort of expecting the deceased to walk in the door with their hands full of groceries they were planning on using in the air fryer you were haggling over. Surely they had bigger hopes for it than the Trader Joe’s bean and cheese burritos you were going to reheat in it.
Of course there is no greater example of this than the Magic Bullet blender. A staple of any estate sale, it was probably purchased in pursuit of some lofty health and fitness goal. Whoever bought it first probably made a promise to themselves that this was going to be the literal vessel that would hold the ingredients to a better version of them - to days that would start with smoothies, smoothies that would fuel workouts, workouts that would be rewarded with recovery shakes. Like an ouroboros of wellness. They likely even bought supplements that sit expired somewhere in the kitchen (not for sale, but I suppose you could make an offer if you really wanted them).
The irony is that second-hand Magic Bullet blenders are actually fueling the current fentanyl epidemic. As Sam Quinones points out in his novel The Least of Us, Magic Bullets are perfect for cutting down cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills into indistinguishable powder that can be spun up with the incredibly potent synthetic opioid to make a supply go much farther. Therefore Magic Bullets are a telltale sign of drug trafficking and are found in nearly every big drug bust these days.
You never know what kind of life your appliances will live after you die.
My mom’s estate sale find was usually an electric coffee grinder. Brick-sized, uncleanable little buzzing devices that conveniently never lasted more than a year so she could once again resume her search. She was a french-press/whole bean lady, so the sound of beans ricocheting into powder was the music I woke up to whenever I’d visit. I’m sure they make nice ones, and I’m sure that if she added up all that she spent on replacing dying ones with less-dying ones she could’ve bought a new one, but that’s not as much fun.
I still have one that she bought me at a time in my life when I wondered “when will I ever need a fucking coffee grinder?” and it somehow made it all the way to a time in my life when I think, “god, I’m really glad I still have this fucking coffee grinder.”
It comes out on days when my small kids are sleeping (typically after nights when they did not), and I’m feeling brave and desperate enough to drink caffeine after 1pm. I turn on the espresso machine that we only use about once a week. I curl into a nook in the front of my house and wrap the coffee grinder with a towel in hopes it won't wake my kids like it used to wake me. I look out the window at the older Armenian men organizing their kid’s leased luxury cars to avoid tickets for street cleaning. They are filled with joy, family and camaraderie and I think that is the way I wish my mom could have lived out her days, maybe visiting us for coffee while her grandchildren sleep.
But she is gone, so I just have to believe that she would be pleased with this version of the future for the coffee grinder and me.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Just now finding out you have a substack account! To clean a coffee grinder, grind up some dry white rice. It's not perfect but helps. Love your writing!