Probably in 1970. I was 17 and Mom would be about 43. I’d forgotten my hair was that long.

My mother would wander about the house looking for her coffee cup. Maybe she left it on the counter or the coffee table, beside the telephone or on the mantel in the living room. It might be on the picnic table in the back yard from when she went out to check on something.  It was usually cold. The cup was always half-full. Sometimes it was in her hand while she searched.

It keeps me awake, but helps my husband to sleep. He is what might today be diagnosed as ADHD. If he wakes in the middle of the night, drinking a little caffeinated coffee allows him to go right back to sleep. That is actually not uncommon. The caffeine allows some people to focus enough that they stop thinking about a thousand things and instead think about one thing: sleep . . . and they do.

Coffee has the more usual effect on me, so I drink two cups of coffee when I first wake and then I stop, unless I want to be staring at the moonlight half the night.

I began drinking coffee in my thirties as a way of drugging myself into alertness when I driving home from night classes. My children were still preschoolers but I had decided I would return to teaching as a Social Studies teacher. When my husband arrived home from work, I would head out for a 45-minute drive to an evening class. The struggle was remaining alert on the drive home. Coffee did it for me.

A few years later, I was hired as an English teacher, but I didn’t give up night classes. I began driving to Portland State for graduate work in their English Department. I also continued drinking coffee.

I like my coffee strong, black, and unsugared. I like iced coffee with whole milk, and the only way I take sugar in my coffee is in ice cream.

You might think that after nearly fifty years, my husband and I would know all there is to know about one another, but we had a discussion about coffee before six this morning and Gary was surprised to discover I do not sugar my iced coffee.

We had been talking about beer.

I’m not sure what my mother loved about coffee. She was not particular about flavor—she thought that instant and fresh-brewed tasted the same. She always had a cup, but didn’t actually drink it much. Maybe she liked the heat of it in her hand. I recall her reheating coffee in a saucepan on the stove. The microwave was a great timesaver. On the other hand, she never drank everything in her cup.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.