Park City

McPolin Farm

My favorite coffee shop is gone.

I always returned to my favorite little shop, the one that had quietly become part of the ritual of home. The first sip. The familiar faces. The certainty that, for a few minutes, the world could be measured in espresso and conversation.

It didn’t close. It’s not forgotten. Simply replaced by the ones here. 

Another name above the door. Another reminder that places, no matter how much we love them, don't promise permanence.

This town, which I had lazily filed away as wealthy before ever knowing it, began introducing itself. Not with extravagance, but with contradiction. The kind that makes you realize how often assumptions are just distance wearing confidence.

Maybe some of that is true.

But places have a way of introducing themselves before people do.

It took almost no time at all for it to prove us wrong.

Downtown rises like someone folded the earth before laying streets across it. Hills so steep they reminded me of San Francisco, lined with impossibly vibrant colored homes that looked as though they had escaped from the pages of a Shelby Van Pet novel. They watched over everything below. The patios where people lingered over late lunches, nervous first dates waiting outside restaurants so they could walk in together instead of meeting at the table, brides-to-be tumbling out of bars in bursts of laughter and borrowed confidence that echoed long after they disappeared around the corner. Matt got turned away from No Name Saloon because he forgot his ID. 

Life doesn't stop long enough for anyone to notice they're becoming part of someone else's favorite memory.

In Utah, church and state seem to have agreed to never quite let go of each other.

Somewhere between those hills and at my kitchen table.

Usually holding coffee mugs and a puzzle that we broke up with after two days, now it held hair dye and towels because I needed someone to keep up with me being a brunette.

It’s never about the coffee shop.

Or the town.

Or the mountains.

It has always been about how it makes you feel, who, or what is standing beside you while you're there.

I hope I never forget that.

Driving into town became its own kind of prayer.

The road parallel to fields so green they almost felt impossible, the kind of green your eyes forget exists until they're surrounded by it. Weathered barns leaned gently into the open sky while fences stitched together miles of preserved land. Horses graze without urgency. The road asks nothing from you except that you slow down enough to notice.

You breathe differently there.

Deeper.

Slower.

The things that felt enormous before you arrived shrink until they're almost laughable. Deadlines. Notifications. Worries you rehearsed in your head. They lose every ounce of authority when you're staring across a field that has existed longer than your problems ever will.

I hope no one ever decides they're better suited for data centers.

Not everything untouched is waiting to become useful.

Some things are already fulfilling their purpose simply by existing.

We don’t need AI to survive but we do need clean water and air. 

Gracie’s Farm, woman-owned, for one fleeting and completely serious moment, I considered quitting everything to become a cowgirl.

Doesn't that sound wonderful?

And honestly...

a little badass.

Strangers holding glasses of fresh lemonade.

There were only eight of us.

A hot cast iron griddle glowed in the center of the table while thick fur blankets softened the mountain air. The chef, though classically trained in New York, wasn't cooking New York food.

He was cooking home. 

The elk steak was the story of the first hunt he ever took with his father. Every course arrived carrying a memory before it carried a flavor.

Civilizations have always understood something we're constantly forgetting, that people don't become connected because they share opinions.

They become connected because they share experiences.

A bottle of wine.

A loaf of bread.

The warmth of a flame.

Time.

What happens when eight strangers gather around one table?

Something ancient.

Fire has always been at the center of it all.

Long before screens.

Long before schedules.

People have always gathered around flames to share, make music, create art, and fall in love. 

The couple beside us had a child at Berkeley.

Another that might someday ski in the Olympics.

Across from us sat someone who called Park City home but spent every week flying to Boston for work.

A younger couple had once lived just minutes from us in Atlanta during a season when our lives unknowingly overlapped.

For a few hours, none of those details mattered nearly as much as the simple fact that we had all ended up at the same table.

Isn't that miraculous?

How strangers slowly become people you'll remember. 

How someone you've known for three hours can leave a permanent mark on a story you'll tell for years?

Different lives.

Different histories.

One table.

Before we departed, we each wrote down a wish and fed it to the flames.

A quiet offering.

A hopeful goodbye.

We kept the matchbook. 

I've collected them everywhere we've traveled or gone on a date, tucking each one into the crumpled craft paper bag I keep under the cabinet. Someday I'll seal them beneath epoxy, preserving tiny pieces of restaurants, bars, cafés, and places that no one else would think twice about.

Each one is proof that we were there.

That we laughed there.

Maybe that's all traveling really is.

Not collecting destinations.

Collecting moments that quietly become part of who you are.

So until we're gathered around another fire, passing plates to people who were strangers only hours before—

Cheers.