A Time for Savoring a Latte

“Due caffe latte, per favore,” my husband requests our normal order to our waitress. We sit across from each other in front of the café, at a metal table set atop uneven cobblestones. I have the perfect view to people watch. Local shopkeepers prepare their stores for the hordes of tourists to descend later. A man on a bike delivers produce to the restaurant behind us (including the biggest lemons I’ve ever seen). Occasionally, luggage wheels click down the cobblestone as a couple like us walks to the train and away from this idyllic, little town.

We unhurriedly sip our espresso and savor croissants for another thirty minutes before we, too, roll our luggage to the train station up the hill.

On our recent anniversary trip, my husband and I quickly discovered that Italian restaurants rarely serve coffee (or any other food) to-go. As we walked down streets, no one held a Starbucks cup in their hand. Instead, restaurants’ tables spilled into the streets and beckoned tourists and locals alike to sit down for a caffe.

In Italian culture, every meal (and every coffee) is a chance to linger at a table. Waiters and waitresses never rushed to give us a check shortly after delivering our entrees. Rather, they gave us space and time to enjoy our conversation, watch the street around us, and savor the last bites of our dinner without thinking about when we would leave.

Those three slow meals a day were one of my favorite parts of our vacation.

That leisurely dining experience on our vacation stands in stark contrast to our typical frantic mealtimes at home. With three little kids, meals are often a cacophony of cries over spilt cups, requests for more cheese, and whining for dessert. I often scarf down my food because I’m never sure when someone else will need anything. There’s no time to linger at the table when we’re needing to rush out the door or to bedtime.

I know that frenzied mealtimes are often a necessary part of this season of life. My children cannot yet cook for themselves. Their uncoordinated hands make extra messes. Their attempts to help clean up make the process take longer. It would be unrealistic for me to expect our family meals at this stage of life to look anything like a relaxed dinner at an Italian café.

However, while I might not get thirty uninterrupted minutes to enjoy my coffee, I am intrigued by the cultural practice of intentionally slowing down for mealtimes. I think about all the Italians are choosing not to do when they sit down for coffee and a croissant. They could have sent one more email, completed one more errand, or gotten further along in a project. An Italian mom could start one more load of dishes, hang another basket of laundry to dry, or begin prepping for the next meal. But instead, they choose to linger.

This lingering stood out to me amid a fun and busy vacation. My husband and I love to sight see, and most days we walked more than ten miles. Yet every meal we stopped—from thirty minutes to two hours. We ate delicious food, sipped our caffe lattes, and consumed so much bread. These times were anchor points in our day, where we could laugh at awkward cultural missteps we made, discuss the art and architecture we saw, or just sit quietly in each other’s presence. Three times a day, we lingered long enough to rest, reflect, and reset.

I don’t expect my meals to be like this now that I’m home. It’s not the season for that, and vacations are unique moments of rest. But it did encourage me to consider where I could create more moments to linger in our family’s busy schedule. How could I build in enough margin that I could sit down to hear about my daughter’s latest masterpiece, to say yes to one more book before I make dinner, to not rush away from the table to start the dishes? My meals don’t have to be long and quiet in order for me to look into my children’s eyes, to ask them about their favorite part of the day, and to truly listen.

Further, it makes me wonder how I can make room in my mind to linger in my thoughts. How can turning off a podcast give me space to meditate on the Scripture I read that morning? How can I quietly lift up a prayer rather than let my mind race to the next task? How can I leave margin in my day so that my thoughts have time to wander and wonder at the world around me?

I’m not saying that I should linger all the time. There are times to rush out the door to make it to a doctor appointment. There will be busier seasons with impending work deadlines. Sometimes the mounting pile of dishes needs to be tackled. Rather, our trip to Italy reminded me that I need to plan for both times of busyness and times for lingering. Moments of pause are just as the important as the moments I’m rushing from one task to another.

Solomon shared this wisdom in Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heaven,” (3:1). “A time to plant and a time to uproot” (3:2), “a time to weep and a time to laugh” (3:4), “a time to be silent and a time to speak” (3:7), etc. Even a time for savoring a latte and a time for ordering a coffee to-go.

The beauty of lingering is that not all of life is spent lingering. Our work makes our rest even sweeter, and our rest enhances our work.

A good life is not just extended vacations through Tuscany. Nor is the good life relentlessly getting things accomplished. The good life God has designed for us involved both work and rest—and we can value both in our life. Because God “has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

This rest of this summer is busy for our family. I have deadlines for my work and my writing. We have camps and family trips. The calendar is filling up at a surprising pace.

Yet alongside the watercolor painting, ceramic spoon rest, and other souvenirs I brought back from Italy, I also brought back this practice of lingering. We can linger in the silence of a long car drive, leaving space for good conversations as a family. In the hot afternoon, we can linger with a stack of library books that begs us to stay indoors. We can maybe even linger at the dinner table, saying yes to ice cream sundaes and late bedtimes.

Some days this summer I will inevitably have to rush (and take my coffee to-go). But other times, I will choose to slow down and to savor the beautiful things God has given us in this crazy season of life.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Linger."