End of the World and Coffee

       “This is a glorious day!” Tuuli Hollola declared at breakfast time in the main cabin, her eyes alight with fanatic sparkles. This was her usual mood for exposure of her in-laws to ancestral wisdom and historical roots, such as traditional child delivery in sauna, fire kindling by friction, or contusion treatment with urine. Kaino cringed. “We rekindle the civilization with knowledge of our ancestors!” Right, roots it were. “Today, we have coffee!” “What, again?” Veeti scrunched his nose. “I’m not drinking that glop.” “No, this time it’s as like as two peas in a pod,” his mother assured him and hurried to fill the mugs with a thin brownish liquid from the teapot. “It doesn’t smell well,” Aino muttered, not risking to try it. Kaino agreed with her sister wholeheartedly but she wanted too much to drink something hot, and so she risked sipping the substance, even if it took all her willpower to actually swallow that bit. “And it doesn’t taste like anything, much less coffee,” she reported to warn her family. “What served as coffee beans this time? Swamp silt, reindeer lichen, mouse droppings?” “Dandelion roots,” Tuuli retorted, “dried, roasted, and ground. It’s a treasury of vitamins and microelements. And in autumn it’s highly rich in inulin. And it doesn’t have that unwholesome caffeine. Aino, drink it, it’s good for breastfeeding women. Veeti, stop your tantrums, you’re growing and need those vitamins. Saku, you need to drink it all day long to get well and stop spraying us with your microbes.” “You told the same about previous burdock root coffee, and about the first one, out of acorns,” Aino interrupted the wholesome instructions. “And poor Saku had indigestion both times.” “Ad I thidk, it is like real thidg,” ever-dying Saku cut in, and clung to his mug. “Eved if it kills be I’d die happy.” “You’d outlive us all, as any fusser,” Kaino said gravely. She envied his runny nose this moment, she wouldn’t mind sensing imaginary coffee instead of some burnt grass roots. But all she could do was to sigh farewell to the old world and real coffee.