I love picking coffee. It’s my favorite thing of all of the things I do in Guatemala… Just me, my host mom and sometimes my host sister (depending) on the edge of a steep hill that bottoms out into a valley, picking the coffee fruit, berry by berry, and dropping each one into a bag. I’m not sure if the fruit is called a berry but it is a fruit. To be honest, they look like a perfect mix of ripe cherries and grapes, in terms of the shape, but the texture is like no other fruit. It’s like the thin skin of the fruit knows that it’s not the reason this fruit exists, that it’s all about the seed.

Did you know that coffee is the seed of a fruit? When it’s removed from the fruit, it’s a color between yellow and white.

If you want to know where to get lost in this beautiful world, it’s the side of a hill picking coffee. You wrap an apron around your waist and above that apron you wrap a bag. This bag is a harvest sack, and my host mom has sewn smaller bags out of these large sacks specifically for coffee-picking. It’s because the fruit gets heavy and before you know it, your back hurts from the weight of the collection of rich red and pure yellow berries in the bag resting on your middle. And you find the big white costal laying lazy on the ground, but taking all of the credit, and dump all of the fruit satisfyingly into it.

Coffee picking is not hard: you do have to learn how to pick the berry so that the stem doesn’t come off with it. That is the only part that requires even just a little bit “skill.” But as I say that, I remember that my host mom does the tasks that require experience (because she has demasiada pena that I’ll get injured). She makes the branches reachable. She wraps her lasso very loosely around a tall stick and extends the stick up to the branch, then pushes the lasso over the branch so it falls to the other side. (If this sounds really complicated, it would be the same as throwing the rope over the branch). Once the rope is hanging over the branch, she finds a trunk close by and ties one end of the lasso to it, careful to tie it in such a way that it doesn’t make a knot that’s impossible to undo. Then she pulls the other end of the lasso to another trunk, wraps it around it and begins to pull. Beautifully the tall coffee plant lowers to our reach and she ties the lasso on the other end. “Ya” she says, and it is time to begin picking at all those bright cherries.

Some coffee cherries are red, and some are yellow. I don’t know why.

Some of the berries dry up and they don’t make for good beans, the skin shrivels and turns black and all that’s left is the bean inside, other berries are still green and should not be picked yet.. they need more sun and more time (like some people, you know what I mean). Sometimes the cherries slip from your fingers and you can hear them drop. It’s not even worth it to bend down in search of the lost sheep, just wait ’til you’ve reached a breaking point and can grab the bright fruit beaming up at you from between the sticks and leaves. It’s tempting to leave it there, the one beautiful thing on the ground.

And there is something about being out there that makes you want to gossip, to talk about every heartbreak you’ve ever lived or dramatic moment you’ve lived, every sad goodbye you’ve witnessed at an airport but pretended you didn’t see. Because the simplicity of picking coffee beans seems to call for something weightier and more arresting than simply bean-picking. Now I get it, the pick-a-little, talk-a-little song from The Music Man. And as the hours pass and my host mom guided me from one mata (coffee plant) to another, tying them down for me to be able to reach, the dirt and grime have slowly crawled up my fingernails without permission or reprieve and my palms look like an ancient road map, black lines leading to uncertain destinations.

The thing about this day is that I was anxious. A gentleman caller was recently introduced into my life. Think of all the people you unconsciously pass by in a day, all the coffee berries you pick in a single afternoon, but it just takes one to slip from your fingers to send you in search of that one bean until you find it. Or sometimes, you see a bean that is yo’x, (pronounced like yo’sh, the apostrophe represents a slight plause) which is a twin bean, two beans in one, and you pause and stare at it’s magic. My host mom pockets those twin beans, sets them apart.

Still we are so far from drinking an actual cup of coffee. Still I am so far from knowing my future (romantic or otherwise). We are at the front-end of this process, and yet it took a while to get to this point. All year these berries have been growing after the branches sprouted with white flowers, the small berry seeds began to grow thick and fat, month by month, and by early December (some of) the berries are ready to be picked. By the beginning of January the coffee trees are dripping with brilliant berries, red and yellow with still a few green, and, ready to be harvested. By the end of February most all of the beans have been harvested and ready to grow for the next harvest season.

After the beans are picked, they are ‘pulpado’ that means that the white seeds inside the cherry are removed from the fruit. The fruit is extremely sweet and honestly no one eats it. Then the small white seeds (the coffee beans) are soaked in water to rid them of their sweet, sticky flavor. After that they are roasted and either ground or bagged up as is and ready to enjoy.

On this particular day in December, I needed a quiet hill full of coffee and I needed to keep my fingers busy with mindless work. And that is coffee picking.

At the end of the day’s work of picking, my host Mom said: “If I had an esposo, I wouldn’t be working like this” and it hit me with a wall of compunction. It made me sad. I have learned from two years here that good men, like coffee, don’t grow everywhere. And, from my experience, good men in the pueblo are hard to find. Machismo, alcoholism, strict gender roles, intransigent religious beliefs that discourage birth control… While I know that my host mom is unlikely to ever get married again (she is 66), it’s my host sister who I hope and pray finds a partner. All three: Abuelita, Host Mom and Host Sister learned that the simplest way to survive in their world was to be single, to work hard and to support one another. To be honest, it’s not a bad way to do it. But this type of manual labor, cutting coffee and carrying the beans on their backs in big sacks, cutting and carrying firewood every day, paying men to climb up trees to cut their avocados, that is their lives. And it wouldn’t be that way if there were men in the house.

But if the option is to be disrespected, mistreated or cheated on, then working hard is the favorable option. And I know that there are good men in this world but will they come find my host family and show them what it means to be a good man? To raise their children well, be present, not hit their wife or children? Less likely. Does coffee grow everywhere?

And I am lucky to be able to meet a respectful man at all. And I am lucky to know these strong women who have learned how to fight and who invite me to cut coffee with them to pass the time. Until I figure out what is next, there is always work to be done.

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