Coffee Memories

This is a very, very old coffee cup and there IS a story behind it.  When I was a little girl we didn't live in Oklahoma where most of the family lived.  We did a lot of traveling around until I got into 4th grade and then we settled in Texas where I have lived most of my life.  For us 'vacation' meant going to visit our grandparents in Konawa, Oklahoma.  Konawa is one of those little don't blink or you'll miss it towns and it was about a 7 hour drive from our home in the Clear Lake area of Houston.  We would usually arrive late at night (having left after my dad's work day) and go straight to bed while my mom sat up talking to her mom and my Uncle Marshall.  Most of my mom's 9 brothers and sisters lived in Oklahoma and several within a half hour drive from Konawa so in the morning when we woke up my Grandma would make breakfast and people would start dropping in.  Some because they had heard we were visiting and some because that was their normal routine.  The two I remember most clearly were my Uncle Jack and my Uncle Dean.  Both lived nearby and I think they made stopping in at Grandma's for breakfast a pretty regular part of their day.  See, my Grandma had been a widow since she was 59 years old, she lived in a little house in Konawa with my Uncle Marshall (Mart) who had never married and I think in retrospect that her sons were always a bit protective of her.  Anyway she used these coffee cups every day of her life (at least her life after I knew her) and whenever I hear the words "cup of coffee" this is the cup I picture the coffee being in.  She ate eggs with raw onions and homemade biscuits and made her coffee in a white percolator on the stovetop.  (no one had even heard of an electric coffee maker) She spent a lot of time jumping up and down to add things to the table as people came and left but her seat was always at the end and her coffee cup was always sitting there at her place.  Coffee was a big deal, a real sign of adulthood and you had to be "grown-up" enough to drink coffee, at least according to my parents.  (My cousins Larry and Randy drank coffee with the grown-ups and I deeply resented it but their dad said it was okay!)  When my Grandma went into a nursing home I was part of the group of people who cleaned out her little house and as her belongings were claimed by different family members I asked if I could have the coffee cups.  I recently unpacked them from the last of our many moves and set them up at my coffee maker. The contrast between her mornings and mine made me laugh.  I'm the only coffee drinker in my house so I'm into the Keurig, individual cup thing and I do like my Starbucks but there's something really special, nostalgic and familiar about coffee in this cup!