Slice Number Four - Memories Greet Me Every Morning

                              I'm a part of the March Slice of Life Challenge with Ruth and Stacey at the Two Writing Teachers Blog, and almost 200 other incredible writers!  WOW!

Sometime in the near future, I know that my husband and I will need to move for various reasons:  to be nearer my daughter and her family, my work, and places in the city that we like to visit (museums, etc.).  It will make parts of our life easier.  And my connection in this post with moving is that I'm beginning to choose what I'll want to keep, and what I will leave behind, so I've begin really looking at what is in my house.   But this story isn’t about moving, this post is about stories written on certain items in my house, the things I believe I must take.  I imagine that you own such items too.

Because it’s Sunday, a slow-coffee morning for us, I thought I’d share some different cups that live in my kitchen cabinet. Each one, when chosen, makes me remember certain people and places with them.

Here's where these memories live.

A cup I kept from my mother's cabinet.  Whenever I visited her, I would choose this cup.  In the final months of her time in her home, she began giving things away, and she gave me this, knowing that it was special to me.

One year, my students created a coffee table top mosaic for our school's auction.  I bought old china from thrift stores so that student could break it up and use the best pieces to make the picture they had designed.  This cup was never chosen, so I took it home to remember that fun time we had breaking dishes, messing with plaster, and creating a masterpiece.

I took long trips with students every year I had a classroom (middle-school aged).  We traveled to Washington state and DC, to Mexico and Costa Rica, on sailing trips in both the Pacific and the Atlantic.  One of the last trips was to New York City.  I bought this cup as a souvenir of that exciting time.

A student's parent brought me this cup from Starbucks one day, filled with cafe mocha.  Once a week she dropped in with more to fill the cup, and to chat about education.  

This is a cup I had made via Snapfish for my husband for an anniversary gift not too long ago, as you can see from the grandchildren's pics on it.  The words around the cup are our song, the one that goes "Oh we ain't got a barrel of money, maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along, singing our song, side by side!"

This is a cup from a dear aunt, who was like a second mother to me.  She often mailed little gifts to say hello, and this is one of them.

This is from a student recently who knows how much I love to read.  It came with a dry erase pen so I could keep a list of my TBR's

This is a cup from my children's childhood.  Both of them loved it, and now the grandchildren use it, passing it on so that the younger ones can enjoy it, too.  It says:  "Who lives in this cup?"

And here is who lives in the cup.

My mother loved coffee and every year we gave her a cup.  This is an early Starbucks Christmas cup that we found for her, and when she died, we got it back.  So this, like the first one, says mother to me and I remember coffee with her and talk and lots of laughter.

So every morning when I open the cabinet to choose a cup, I imagine all these people and events shouting out at me from the past.