Ashlawn Farms
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It’s 1 PM, but I want some god damn coffee. My work schedule is essentially random, and by random I mean, “The hours nobody else wants to work”. Some days it’s from 6:30 AM to 3, some days it’s from 2:30 PM to 10:30 PM, and nothing stops those two schedules from being back-to-back. My ability to sleep like a normal person has been lost years ago. I can go weeks without having an actual 8-hour sleep cycle, even on a day off. Give me my god damn miracle drug.
Ashlawn Farms is connected to an actual farm in Lyme, CT, but this tiny coffee shop next to a train station is about as far from a farm as you can get. It’s far from my place of work too, about a block. I’m not going to take my car there, for the same reason you don’t use twenty dollar bills as napkins, but I have an hour-long lunch and no more. So I run.
Some days I follow the road, dodging between cars. There are no stoplights to wait on in this path, no crosswalks other than the vague suggestions between parking lots. The sidewalk disappears as I run past the cemetery. That lot filled up years ago, left untouched out of some vestige of reverence for what history we have. The thing about train stations is that everyone wants to leave them, so when slick winter snowbanks pile up two feet high your life becomes human Frogger, the prize a two-dollar cup of coffee won by evading every minivan in town.
This place was engineered to appeal to a diverse, hip, modern crowd. Music constantly plays over their speakers, usually country or a top 40 track from no later than 1995. Farm supplies and bare wood compliment a simulated fireplace. I would guess it was meant to seem rustic, but the menu is not. Ashlawn changes its specials every season, lattes to match the attitudes our weather inspires. If I show up as late as say, 1 PM, I need to get that latte because the coffee has gone black in the bottom of the pot, and only sugar can save it. Their baked goods tend towards the fanciful; brownies with powdered sugar and sea-salt pretzels, cinnamon rolls with cranberries wrapped within. Even a simple egg and sausage sandwich is dressed up in words like “chevré cheese”.
Ashlawn is a world meant for travelers, city-dwellers. I can absorb snippets of conversations while sitting and drinking, always some college thesis or business deal. These are not the people who live in this town, only the ones passing through it. Why would this coffee shop try to appeal to those living here, when so many of them are either summer vacationers or poor? Then again, I don’t live in this town either. It’s only where I work. At least Ashlawn can keep the hearth warm and the coffee flowing.
The Courtyard Restaurant
![Posted Image]()
It’s 10:30 AM, and I will be very sad if I don’t get some god damn coffee. This retail store opens at 7 AM to sell candy bars to tumbleweeds for an hour. Working here is better than having no money at all, of course, that’s what I’ve been told. I’m slightly above minimum wage, even. I would understand being awake for a 7 AM work shift if I were a pre-industrial farmer who needed to thresh grain before the sun went down. As it stands, the only customers I see on the first four hours, 6:30 to 10:30, are other minimum wage workers buying energy drink “breakfasts” on the way to their own comically early shifts, along with the odd traveler who has nowhere else to shop before leaving their hotel room. This is a machine that feeds itself in a grotesque ouroborous. The coffee lets me pretend I slept at some point.
The Courtyard Restaurant is literally a Restaurant in a Courtyard. The name belies the diner’s creativity. It’s in the same building complex as the store I work in, likely having been there decades before my employer. It used to be a Caldor’s, only to be bought out and hollowed out, another link in a chain. But this isn’t about the store I work at; this is about where I go to get away from the store.
Some days I walk around the perimeter of the complex. Running is too much effort this early in the morning. Empty storefront, gift shop, shoe store, women’s apparel, another shoe store. There’s also the other way around. Liquor store, Radio Shack, empty storefront, pawn shop, empty storefront. I pass the 18-wheeler that’s always parked there, to a slate walkway surrounded by pines. I don’t know who maintains these pines; nobody ever visits this area just to rest. I pass what used to be a bookstore before it became an empty storefront, and open the door.
If the owner of The Courtyard Restaurant ever cared about appealing to an audience, she doesn’t now. Everything is decorated in off-white and pale pink, clean, frozen in time. The photos and shelf trinkets are likely just things the owner collected. The old-school diner design is not an attempt to attract anyone so much as it is a deliberate refusal to change. Breakfasts are eggs any style, paper-thin bacon, wonderfully light toast, and misplaced kielbasa. Lunches are hamburgers served moist, chicken soup, and the liver and onions, which is more of a suggestion than a threat. The coffee will not go bad in the pot, because the diner closes at 2 PM. This place is open when the owner wants it to be, and they have no desire to linger for longer than they want to. That’s the beauty of setting your own hours.
The Courtyard Restaurant is a world meant for the old retired people who want the town to stop changing. There’s silence here, silence and Wi-Fi borrowed from another nearby store. Businesses are born and killed, forests are chewed up for more space, and here you can pretend that nothing ever happened. I once asked the owner how she kept this place running- she shrugged, and simply said, “Work”. A restaurant that stays in business through sheer stubbornness is admirable, but not pushing any envelopes. But hey, she sometimes refills my coffee for free.
Coffé Toscana
![Posted Image]()
It’s 12 PM, and even though I don’t need coffee, I’m getting some god damn coffee. It’s become a ritual, if not an addiction. There’s no physical withdrawal- I barely feel different with or without the stuff- but there’s little else to drink around here. I could have a sugary energy drink, or a sugary soda pop, or a sugary sweet tea, or a sugary fruit juice. Sometimes I get sick of sugar. What I need is dark roast coffee, with a thimble full of cream, real liquid cream, so it‘s a few degrees cooler than the sun’s surface. A bitter drink to offset the sugar I’m absorbing constantly for the rest of the week. It’s a moment of clarity, sometimes the first real beverage I’ve had all day.
Coffé Toscana is an establishment stuck in the heart of the town’s main street. This is the high-class commercial zone, the row of stores laid out for our consumption. In the summer, the rich folk move into their vacation homes and spend a few months in what they were told was a beautiful town. There’s beauty to see here, in osprey nests and untamed ocean, but that requires looking up from your job for a moment.
Some days I’m not afraid of a crosswalk or two. The first one is tame for a four-lane intersection. They have a new signal button, one with a contact sensor instead of a fat button. The second is tougher. Between the tarot reader shack and the psychic hotline shack, there is nothing but a polite pedestrian crossing sign and wishes protecting you from traffic in the busiest part of the town. Most days someone is polite enough to stop… most days. The Paperback Café across the street would be great to visit if I could make it past, but Coffé Toscana takes one less crosswalk and is so much closer, so there I go.
This place is small and cramped, which is how you can tell it’s a classy, upscale café. The chefs are all native Spanish-speakers, but they are bilingual and I can understand a few words of Spanish besides. The decorations are also Hispanic, with even the television tuned to the Español channel. The coffee is dark and strong and plentiful, with a medium nearly as cheap as a small at Ashlawn. The chefs serve to satisfy first and impress second; order a toast cheese and you get two, with tomato and a bag of chips. Ask for an omelet and it’s made with three eggs and three toppings. Order the eggplant parmesan and wonder why you’d pay more than eight dollars for that anywhere else. Here is a restaurant that cares about the individuals eating there.
Coffé Toscana is trapped between worlds, though. Everything about its menu is meant for working class people. With large portions served relatively fast featuring interesting and varied flavors, located in the heart of town so every blue collar and middle class worker passes by, this café is a profitable restaurant and a positive influence on the town. It just so happens that everything “quaint” about this place also happens to endear it to the summer tourists. How long it will remain genuine, I have no idea. Perhaps it’s not worth worrying about compared to so many other problems in the world. Perhaps ignoring these kinds of things is the problem.
Dunkin’ Donuts
![Posted Image]()
Image shamelessly poached from bostonmagazine.com
It’s 6 PM, and it’s not just god damned coffee that I want. The break room at work has old burnt coffee if I ever felt that desperate. Part of the ritual is to get away from the atmosphere of my workplace. In this store the dry air desiccates my skin, fracturing into calluses and scars; in this store the endless march of solemn grandmothers is both customer and employee, lower teeth bared in frown lines. This is not all the world has to offer, and I need to remember that for 8 dollars plus tips every day.
Dunkin’ Donuts is… you know what Dunkin’ Donuts is. It’s a fast food chain, they’re everywhere in the United States. My hometown somehow has two. This one is down by the same crosswalk I cross to get to Coffé Toscana, blazing the orange and purple neon even in the dead of night, when any sane place has stopped serving breakfast. And it’s close, very close, a short jaunt that’s less than five minutes if the traffic lights agree with me.
Some days I wonder if I should get an actual meal when my lunch is this late. There’s a bar and grill far past the dreaded second crosswalk, one that makes good hot dogs quickly, but that’s not what I came for. There’s a Burger King right here if I wanted cheap and fast food, but it’s really not that cheap and the Angry Whopper did terrible things to me last time I went there. The Paperback Café I mentioned is a nice establishment except for the overpriced fare and the hilariously slow service. I could just bring and eat my own lunch, but again, I seek atmosphere. So I just get some donuts already.
I’ve been complaining quite a bit, but something about the Dunkin’ Donuts is all right with me. Perhaps it is lowered expectations; it is just donuts, after all. The coffee is serviceable if heavy on the cream, and I have no need of a greasy egg sandwich when I can just have 12 donuts, or a box of donut holes. The opposite side of lowered expectations is that I don’t really feel any obligations there. It’s not an urban trendsetter, it’s not a home for grumpy old folk, and it’s not a tourist’s plaything. It is donuts and donuts alone, thin wispy glazed and heavy dessert-like Bavarian cream and rich tough old fashioned for literally dunking a donut. The frosting will sometimes have holiday themes, drawn with wildly varying levels of skill. And if you remember the meme about Cronuts, the croissant dough donut which once brought fame and ruin to a New York bakery, they have Cronuts mass-produced here too. All I asked for is donuts, and I got it.
Dunkin’ Donuts gives me twelve donuts. I don’t eat all twelve donuts myself because I’m not a total glutton. Okay, maybe I eat four… you got me, five. But the rest have a purpose far more important than myself. I lift that box up to my chest, or over my head if there’s rain falling, and I run. The crosswalk means nothing since I have time to wait, and the parking lot has no car that can strike me. I return to the break room with the one thing all of my co-workers can agree on, sugar and fried dough. I hand one to an old lady and she manages a smile. Perhaps work doesn’t have to be suffering when at least one person gives a damn, and is awake enough to care. Because he got his god damn coffee.
It’s 1 PM, but I want some god damn coffee. My work schedule is essentially random, and by random I mean, “The hours nobody else wants to work”. Some days it’s from 6:30 AM to 3, some days it’s from 2:30 PM to 10:30 PM, and nothing stops those two schedules from being back-to-back. My ability to sleep like a normal person has been lost years ago. I can go weeks without having an actual 8-hour sleep cycle, even on a day off. Give me my god damn miracle drug.
Ashlawn Farms is connected to an actual farm in Lyme, CT, but this tiny coffee shop next to a train station is about as far from a farm as you can get. It’s far from my place of work too, about a block. I’m not going to take my car there, for the same reason you don’t use twenty dollar bills as napkins, but I have an hour-long lunch and no more. So I run.
Some days I follow the road, dodging between cars. There are no stoplights to wait on in this path, no crosswalks other than the vague suggestions between parking lots. The sidewalk disappears as I run past the cemetery. That lot filled up years ago, left untouched out of some vestige of reverence for what history we have. The thing about train stations is that everyone wants to leave them, so when slick winter snowbanks pile up two feet high your life becomes human Frogger, the prize a two-dollar cup of coffee won by evading every minivan in town.
This place was engineered to appeal to a diverse, hip, modern crowd. Music constantly plays over their speakers, usually country or a top 40 track from no later than 1995. Farm supplies and bare wood compliment a simulated fireplace. I would guess it was meant to seem rustic, but the menu is not. Ashlawn changes its specials every season, lattes to match the attitudes our weather inspires. If I show up as late as say, 1 PM, I need to get that latte because the coffee has gone black in the bottom of the pot, and only sugar can save it. Their baked goods tend towards the fanciful; brownies with powdered sugar and sea-salt pretzels, cinnamon rolls with cranberries wrapped within. Even a simple egg and sausage sandwich is dressed up in words like “chevré cheese”.
Ashlawn is a world meant for travelers, city-dwellers. I can absorb snippets of conversations while sitting and drinking, always some college thesis or business deal. These are not the people who live in this town, only the ones passing through it. Why would this coffee shop try to appeal to those living here, when so many of them are either summer vacationers or poor? Then again, I don’t live in this town either. It’s only where I work. At least Ashlawn can keep the hearth warm and the coffee flowing.
The Courtyard Restaurant
It’s 10:30 AM, and I will be very sad if I don’t get some god damn coffee. This retail store opens at 7 AM to sell candy bars to tumbleweeds for an hour. Working here is better than having no money at all, of course, that’s what I’ve been told. I’m slightly above minimum wage, even. I would understand being awake for a 7 AM work shift if I were a pre-industrial farmer who needed to thresh grain before the sun went down. As it stands, the only customers I see on the first four hours, 6:30 to 10:30, are other minimum wage workers buying energy drink “breakfasts” on the way to their own comically early shifts, along with the odd traveler who has nowhere else to shop before leaving their hotel room. This is a machine that feeds itself in a grotesque ouroborous. The coffee lets me pretend I slept at some point.
The Courtyard Restaurant is literally a Restaurant in a Courtyard. The name belies the diner’s creativity. It’s in the same building complex as the store I work in, likely having been there decades before my employer. It used to be a Caldor’s, only to be bought out and hollowed out, another link in a chain. But this isn’t about the store I work at; this is about where I go to get away from the store.
Some days I walk around the perimeter of the complex. Running is too much effort this early in the morning. Empty storefront, gift shop, shoe store, women’s apparel, another shoe store. There’s also the other way around. Liquor store, Radio Shack, empty storefront, pawn shop, empty storefront. I pass the 18-wheeler that’s always parked there, to a slate walkway surrounded by pines. I don’t know who maintains these pines; nobody ever visits this area just to rest. I pass what used to be a bookstore before it became an empty storefront, and open the door.
If the owner of The Courtyard Restaurant ever cared about appealing to an audience, she doesn’t now. Everything is decorated in off-white and pale pink, clean, frozen in time. The photos and shelf trinkets are likely just things the owner collected. The old-school diner design is not an attempt to attract anyone so much as it is a deliberate refusal to change. Breakfasts are eggs any style, paper-thin bacon, wonderfully light toast, and misplaced kielbasa. Lunches are hamburgers served moist, chicken soup, and the liver and onions, which is more of a suggestion than a threat. The coffee will not go bad in the pot, because the diner closes at 2 PM. This place is open when the owner wants it to be, and they have no desire to linger for longer than they want to. That’s the beauty of setting your own hours.
The Courtyard Restaurant is a world meant for the old retired people who want the town to stop changing. There’s silence here, silence and Wi-Fi borrowed from another nearby store. Businesses are born and killed, forests are chewed up for more space, and here you can pretend that nothing ever happened. I once asked the owner how she kept this place running- she shrugged, and simply said, “Work”. A restaurant that stays in business through sheer stubbornness is admirable, but not pushing any envelopes. But hey, she sometimes refills my coffee for free.
Coffé Toscana
It’s 12 PM, and even though I don’t need coffee, I’m getting some god damn coffee. It’s become a ritual, if not an addiction. There’s no physical withdrawal- I barely feel different with or without the stuff- but there’s little else to drink around here. I could have a sugary energy drink, or a sugary soda pop, or a sugary sweet tea, or a sugary fruit juice. Sometimes I get sick of sugar. What I need is dark roast coffee, with a thimble full of cream, real liquid cream, so it‘s a few degrees cooler than the sun’s surface. A bitter drink to offset the sugar I’m absorbing constantly for the rest of the week. It’s a moment of clarity, sometimes the first real beverage I’ve had all day.
Coffé Toscana is an establishment stuck in the heart of the town’s main street. This is the high-class commercial zone, the row of stores laid out for our consumption. In the summer, the rich folk move into their vacation homes and spend a few months in what they were told was a beautiful town. There’s beauty to see here, in osprey nests and untamed ocean, but that requires looking up from your job for a moment.
Some days I’m not afraid of a crosswalk or two. The first one is tame for a four-lane intersection. They have a new signal button, one with a contact sensor instead of a fat button. The second is tougher. Between the tarot reader shack and the psychic hotline shack, there is nothing but a polite pedestrian crossing sign and wishes protecting you from traffic in the busiest part of the town. Most days someone is polite enough to stop… most days. The Paperback Café across the street would be great to visit if I could make it past, but Coffé Toscana takes one less crosswalk and is so much closer, so there I go.
This place is small and cramped, which is how you can tell it’s a classy, upscale café. The chefs are all native Spanish-speakers, but they are bilingual and I can understand a few words of Spanish besides. The decorations are also Hispanic, with even the television tuned to the Español channel. The coffee is dark and strong and plentiful, with a medium nearly as cheap as a small at Ashlawn. The chefs serve to satisfy first and impress second; order a toast cheese and you get two, with tomato and a bag of chips. Ask for an omelet and it’s made with three eggs and three toppings. Order the eggplant parmesan and wonder why you’d pay more than eight dollars for that anywhere else. Here is a restaurant that cares about the individuals eating there.
Coffé Toscana is trapped between worlds, though. Everything about its menu is meant for working class people. With large portions served relatively fast featuring interesting and varied flavors, located in the heart of town so every blue collar and middle class worker passes by, this café is a profitable restaurant and a positive influence on the town. It just so happens that everything “quaint” about this place also happens to endear it to the summer tourists. How long it will remain genuine, I have no idea. Perhaps it’s not worth worrying about compared to so many other problems in the world. Perhaps ignoring these kinds of things is the problem.
Dunkin’ Donuts
Image shamelessly poached from bostonmagazine.com
It’s 6 PM, and it’s not just god damned coffee that I want. The break room at work has old burnt coffee if I ever felt that desperate. Part of the ritual is to get away from the atmosphere of my workplace. In this store the dry air desiccates my skin, fracturing into calluses and scars; in this store the endless march of solemn grandmothers is both customer and employee, lower teeth bared in frown lines. This is not all the world has to offer, and I need to remember that for 8 dollars plus tips every day.
Dunkin’ Donuts is… you know what Dunkin’ Donuts is. It’s a fast food chain, they’re everywhere in the United States. My hometown somehow has two. This one is down by the same crosswalk I cross to get to Coffé Toscana, blazing the orange and purple neon even in the dead of night, when any sane place has stopped serving breakfast. And it’s close, very close, a short jaunt that’s less than five minutes if the traffic lights agree with me.
Some days I wonder if I should get an actual meal when my lunch is this late. There’s a bar and grill far past the dreaded second crosswalk, one that makes good hot dogs quickly, but that’s not what I came for. There’s a Burger King right here if I wanted cheap and fast food, but it’s really not that cheap and the Angry Whopper did terrible things to me last time I went there. The Paperback Café I mentioned is a nice establishment except for the overpriced fare and the hilariously slow service. I could just bring and eat my own lunch, but again, I seek atmosphere. So I just get some donuts already.
I’ve been complaining quite a bit, but something about the Dunkin’ Donuts is all right with me. Perhaps it is lowered expectations; it is just donuts, after all. The coffee is serviceable if heavy on the cream, and I have no need of a greasy egg sandwich when I can just have 12 donuts, or a box of donut holes. The opposite side of lowered expectations is that I don’t really feel any obligations there. It’s not an urban trendsetter, it’s not a home for grumpy old folk, and it’s not a tourist’s plaything. It is donuts and donuts alone, thin wispy glazed and heavy dessert-like Bavarian cream and rich tough old fashioned for literally dunking a donut. The frosting will sometimes have holiday themes, drawn with wildly varying levels of skill. And if you remember the meme about Cronuts, the croissant dough donut which once brought fame and ruin to a New York bakery, they have Cronuts mass-produced here too. All I asked for is donuts, and I got it.
Dunkin’ Donuts gives me twelve donuts. I don’t eat all twelve donuts myself because I’m not a total glutton. Okay, maybe I eat four… you got me, five. But the rest have a purpose far more important than myself. I lift that box up to my chest, or over my head if there’s rain falling, and I run. The crosswalk means nothing since I have time to wait, and the parking lot has no car that can strike me. I return to the break room with the one thing all of my co-workers can agree on, sugar and fried dough. I hand one to an old lady and she manages a smile. Perhaps work doesn’t have to be suffering when at least one person gives a damn, and is awake enough to care. Because he got his god damn coffee.