hot drinks on a rain-grey beach

Well it appears I have not written my monthly hoot in hell for many moons.  But here I am, tapping away at the keyboard once again.  At my grandparents' house on fire island it has been raining since late last night.  I have become something of an expert at killing mosquitoes while half asleep.  I usually leave them on the wall like trophies of the night's hunt.  I've been here for almost a week with my main squeeze Christina.  Most of this time was spent in the good raucous company of friends and family.  We gathered what we could from the bay and ate it.  Crabs, clams, whelk, sea bass, snappers, and even  little baitfish shiners fried up whole  all graced our table.  Now it's quiet but for the ocean and its constant rolling wash.  The fragmites grass is probably 12 feet tall and as high as it will get this year.  It's a perfect day for tea, but we wanted coffee.  All we could find was some Folger's coffee bags (like tea-bags, but with coffee, ya know? clever idea, I thought. Wrong. Not clever. Bad) some instant stuff and a can of old pre-ground espresso that actually smelled more like compost than coffee.  We tried a little of each.  A taste test. A cupping, as they call it in the biz.  The Folger's actually tasted nothing like coffee at all.  Kind of similar to lightly roasted cardboard, actually.  Non-corrugated.  The instant stuff, which I believe was Community Coffee with Chicory, smelled and tasted like instant oatmeal.  Probably would have been very nice with cream and sugar, or a couple ounces of cheap whiskey.  The espresso, an ancient batch of Medaglia D'Oro I think, was by far the winner but only because it actually tasted like coffee.  However, it left a pretty unpleasant rancid filmy residue in the mouth.  Now of all the places that rancid filmy residues occur, and there are of course many, the mouth is, in my opinion, the least acceptable.  So we had tea.  PG Tips. With honey. My favorite.