Old Mugs

Illustration by Molly Erickson

Mom always started the mornings with a pot of coffee. This plain, black coffee made me feel at home. A tin of Maxwell House held permanent residence on the countertop; I distinctly remember the blue lid from my childhood with the aluminum seal that I had to peel before the coffee smell smacked my nine-year-old nose in the face. My dad bought the Bunn coffee maker at an auction a year prior. It made 12 cups in four minutes, sprinkling into the glass pot, its edges stained from years of use. It was there to ensure caffeinated survival for my parents, who lived their lives rising early and resting late. My first sip of coffee was bitter and shocking. I didn’t understand how Mom could drink the stuff. When I asked, she shrugged and told me she’d had coffee every day since she was 14 years old.

The next year, my mother and I took a road trip out west to where she grew up. There were no hills; flat fields surrounded us as they did at home, but it somehow felt obscure. This road trip was just the two of us, as my siblings stayed at home. We left early, Mom setting the thermos of hot black coffee in the center counsel of the old pickup. I chose the radio stations. A day later, we took a short trip from my cousin’s house to the cemetery where my grandmother rested. We pulled in and I saw the family names on many of the stones. Once the truck was parked, Mom grabbed the thermos and we walked up a small, green hill to where my grandmother lay, unwearied.

We sat for a while, and Mom talked about my grandmother while I kept my hands busy by ripping up the grass. My grandmother was raised Catholic in the 1950s and 1960s. She dropped out of school after the eighth grade. From there, she worked as a waitress a few towns over with her sister until her mom called her back home to help with the farm when she was twenty. A few years later she met my grandfather and settled down. They had three kids together, and my grandmother was dead before my mother’s younger siblings graduated high school. My mother wonders if there was something in the water they were drinking, or maybe they should have eaten more vegetables. Once my grandmother started chemotherapy, she described everything as tasting like metal, like sucking on a spoon for too long. I drank some of the coffee from that morning, trying to connect with my distracted mother. I felt its bitter taste roll down my throat and thought about how doomed my grandmother felt in her last few months of life.

School started the autumn after our trip, which left me daydreaming about my summer and my dead grandmother. My fourth-grade English teacher was terrifying. She was one of those old teachers who had been there since your parents were in school – literally. This woman didn’t like my father when he was her student, ultimately screwing me over twenty-five years later. Mrs. Wilson carried a giant plastic thermos filled with dark coffee around the classroom, lurking over my desk and judging my cursive penmanship. She always smelled like breath mints and cheap coffee and wore reading glasses on the tip of her nose. I distinctly remember her sitting at her desk lecturing us about using figurative language when we wrote journal entries. She never yelled at us, but she had a quiet anger that was much scarier than being verbally scolded. She was a grandmother herself, and would often speak of her young grandchildren. I imagined that she may have been like my grandmother when she was outside of the classroom. They were both women of the 1960s who grew up on farms in Iowa and allowed their families to be the center point of their lives. I believed that Mrs. Wilson would nurture her family’s children with constant vigilance, never ceasing to love them, even when they did something to upset her. 

When we wanted to talk to Mrs. Wilson, we had to slowly walk to her desk and stand next to her and her giant thermos of coffee. She would look up from her paper grade book, her eyes seeing straight through any bullshit we tried to put past her. Her time as a teacher was reflected in her classroom order. Mrs. Wilson did not appreciate the stack of late assignments I often handed her.

Later in high school, they’d let us leave the school during free periods. On especially difficult days I would hop in my friend’s old car and we’d ride five minutes to the nearest gas station. We’d wander the shelves of energy drinks and liquor and glance at the cigarettes on the back shelf behind the counter. I grabbed a paper cup and filled it with their shitty black coffee, knowing that this was the only thing keeping me awake through my classes. Somehow this was one of the biggest joys of my days. We’d drive back to the school and sit in the parking lot, sipping on our burned drinks. 

I had turned into my mother, through and through. I always appreciated the bad coffee more than the good stuff they gave you at the diner a mile over; there was something about bad coffee that made me feel better. If I was having a rough day, the coffee had to be worse. It was reassurance that I carried with me through most of my childhood.

A few months ago, my parents gifted me a small coffee maker. It’s almost entirely plastic and is one of the loudest little machines I’ve ever heard. I set it in the corner of my room along with an array of cheap filters and coffee from the dollar store. The mugs that stand beside it are older than I am, stained from tea and coffee alike. In the mornings before my early classes, I sit on my carpeted floor and sip on hot coffee to give myself time to reflect. During these moments, I am often drawn back to that summer trip not so long ago, sitting in the same position my mother did when she remembered my grandmother. Though there is no grass to tear, I grip the mug that rests between my fingers, knowing that this daily ritual was one my grandmother completed in her mornings from long ago, and I see her in the reflection of my coffee swirling in the mug. Now when friends come over, they comment on the smell of the place and make fun of the generation-long caffeine addiction I’ve grown into.