After graduating I left the village over the Andean mountain ranges and had to move to the city, they offered me a job at the national library. They were looking for someone with my resume in languages.

I felt fulfilled although I confess that I was very homesick to leave that beautiful town behind. I am a country girl, I have lived in the village all my life mixing hard work and wonderful stories in the countless pages I have read.

Every afternoon it was snack time. My mother would prepare a jar of Andean coffee, the kind that is prepared over firewood, when it was ready she would add a piece of burnt wood from the stove and that soft and sweet aroma of coffee would be released. Everyone came to the living room of the fireplace to seek warmth and the mainstay of the day as we call the snack.

We were all around the fireplace, my mother and some of my sisters served the coffee to the firewood, freshly baked breads, goat cheese from the farmyard of my brothers. All this was accompanied by reading one of the books I borrowed from the school library. I read great classics to them and they were very excited. I will miss these family gatherings.

I moved into an apartment I rented in the center of the noisy city. It's very nice but it doesn't have the chicken run or the coolness of the mountain climate. I unpacked my things, my mother gave me a bag with several kilos of mountain coffee so I wouldn't have to drink that city coffee that my father calls plastic coffee.

On my first day of work I was shown all the aisles full of books of all kinds. Enamored with so much literature together I wandered through the shelves checking out a few books that interested me. The head librarian was busy so he told me to leave everything in my hands and left.

I noticed that very few patrons were at the library tables reading or doing their research. I thought the place would be full but it was not. I thought about the people of the town with a library like this, with all these texts at their disposal.

Months went by and little by little I devoured every single book I found in the library. Some days I would read up to 3 short books. I felt so nourished and happy.

One afternoon I pulled out my thermos of mountain coffee, poured my favorite cup and went for a round. There were 2 boys doing a summary for a school paper and an old lady reading a novel and quietly crying.

I continued to the end of the aisle of literary texts to take one to my desk when between an ode and a novel a strange book appeared. The cover was red, thick and ancient. I opened it and noticed that it was handwritten.

The calligraphy read "The Secret Alchemic Magic of Coffee". My curiosity piqued by the manuscript, I placed my cup of coffee on the shelf, knelt on the floor and began to read.

It was so wonderful so much knowledge about the beloved liquid that my people have taught me, it is a tradition of my people to harvest our own coffee. I felt the strong Andean coffee that I was drinking running through my veins and my roots also vibrated.

I was in front of the source of all knowledge that told me between its pages that the absolute knowledge was in the coffee whose harvesting process involved all the elements: water, fire, air and earth. This vital cycle gave to the one who drank pure coffee, the total knowledge of life.

I felt fulfilled. For this reason the people in my village were so intelligent and the elders had a great wisdom because of their experience that was admirable.

Lost among its pages and its mysteries revealed, I found a warning. The sage who wrote the book warned that if this knowledge got into the wrong hands they could begin to profit from it and the balance between the elements when threatened could eventually leave humans without their ability to rationalize.

I got scared. We had enough trouble in town trying to keep tourist corporations away from our beautiful mountain.

I thought about it. I picked up a lighter and without remorse watched as the flames of the fire consumed every letter of that book of infinite wisdom.

Time flew by and night fell. I meditated for a while and felt fortunate to get that book and to have read it to preserve knowledge.

That night will remain in my history, among shelves and old books, as the moment when I made the difficult decision to burn years of history to preserve the secret of coffee and infinite knowledge.