Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Why a Coffee Cup?


It is important that I begin by explaining the meaning behind the name of my Blog. When I was a little girl there were many things about my mother that I remember closely watching. I am not sure why I watched her so intently. It could have been that I was a little girl and she was a big girl. It could have been simply that she was my mother. Or, it could have been that somehow I sensed, how special she was and how little time I would have with her on this earth.

Of all of the things that I observed there are several that always come to mind when I think of her. First, was how she would get herself ready-to-go. I would sit on the toilet in our small bathroom and watch her every move. She used to tease her hair up into this giant mess and some how manage it into this very neat and carefully placed ‘do’. She lined her lips in brown and because she was so very fair she used a pencil to color her eyebrows in place.

Next, I watched how she interacted with family and children. I was mesmerized by how she knew exactly what to do to make my baby brother stop crying. I asked her one time, “Momma, how do you always know what he wants when he cries?” She very simply replied “ a mother just knows.” I asked her if I would know too when the time came. She assured me that when God saw fit to bless me with a baby that I too would know.

Lastly, her fixation with coffee was a wonder. She drank it all through out the day. Her girlfriends often sat and drank with her. There was just something about coffee that seemed to make her whole. Boy, oh boy, would she loves Starbuck’s today. I tried it once but hated it. I to this day cannot stand it. But, it had some power to calm her, allow her to bond with her friends and to just be that thing that was all hers. I will never forget when she asked daddy to hook the travel trailer up to the power in the drive way so she could drink coffee in the trailer with her neighbor friends. They did this every day. It gave her the perfect vantage point to watch us on Lindy Lane.

My mother loved her home and her family. She was a stay-at-home mom and worked hard to make her home, just-so. She argued with Daddy often about the junk in the backyard. In an effort to please Momma, Daddy agreed to spend a weekend cleaning up his mess. He brought home a long flat bed trailer and proceeded to fill it up with all kinds of junk from our yard.

Our home was exactly one block from our Elementary and Junior High School, Hardeman Elementary and Watauga Junior High School. We of course walked to and from school each day. On this Friday, April 10th, 1981, as I am walking home from school, I can hear my mother calling my name from the backyard, “Carrie…..is that you? Carrie, come to the back yard. Carrie?” I ran to the backyard to find that Momma and Daddy had created this square 12 x 12 slab of concrete where they planned to build a storage building. The concrete was still wet and my hand was the only one missing from the family prints that were dated and placed in the wet cement. I arrived just in time to place my hand in line with my siblings to mark this special day.

The events of the following day changed my life forever and set in motion a future that I would have never expected. I hope you will follow my story and come to truly understand the poignancy of “The Coffee Cup” and why so many of my friends now say “you need to put that in the coffee cup!”,,, when something memorable happens.


1 comment:

  1. Carrie:

    I am so glad to see you doing this....I love it so far and I am hooked and can't wait for the next part!!!

    ReplyDelete