Mug Shot.

The first thing you should know is that I have an affinity for coffee mugs.  While the list of characteristics that make up a good coffee mug isn't necessarily long, the traits are certainly important.  One: size matters.  You can't have such a massive mug that your standard 8 or 10 ounce pour feels like a drop, nor do you want to deal with the frustrations of a mug that is so small you can't add cream to your coffee or tea without it spilling over the top.  Two: the "feel" of a mug is essential.  You need to be able to wrap your hands around it in that cozy way we all likely learn as children drinking our first cups of hot chocolate.  The handle on said mug is also an important part of the overall feel - too tiny of a handle makes it frustrating to hold, to large a handle ruins the whole curl up with a book and a cuppa.  Three: Insulation.  If a mug is poor quality you'll come close to scalding your finger tips each time you use it.  That's no fun.  And, finally, four, the most important trait: the design on your mug - by design I mean color, print, stamp, engraving, whatever it is about that mug that makes it unique and personal, etc. etc.  In my mind, the true mark of a good mug is if it tells a story to whomever is using it.  Maybe it tells them about a place the mug's owner has traveled to, perhaps the graphic on the mug lets them know its owner loves bicycles or skis or puffins.  Maybe this mug even has a mantra on it, some sort of daily reminder about something its owner cares about or a cause they are passionate over.  My point is, a mug needs a voice.  A personality.

I suppose that is how I came to have the shockingly high number of 86 (yup, you read that right. Eight. Six.) coffee mugs accumulated by the time I was packing up my dear treehouse at the end of August in preparation for my move to New York.  Naturally I did not intentionally set out to collect nearly one hundred coffee mugs during my years living in Cambridge; I swear the mugs piled up innocently enough. Truthfully I didn't even realize I had accumulated so many mugs until one night over the summer, daunted by the thoughts of packing up my entire kitchen, I started looking in an often neglected cabinet and remembered I had piled up mugs on the back shelf.  I took those all out and thought to myself, "huh. that's quite a few coffee mugs I have here," while simultaneously remembering the other, rather large pile of coffee mugs that lived above my coffee pot in a different cabinet.  So I took all of those out too, filing up my counter.  I started counting.  Then, I remembered I actually had another box of coffee mugs tucked away in my kitchen pantry too, which naturally I needed to count as well, bringing me to my grand total of 86. 

(And really, if I'm being honest, I probably rang in at even more than 86 since I kept two or three mugs in my desk drawer at work too.  But for the purposes of skewing the data we won't count those.)

It's been a fun guessing game to play with my friends and an ice breaker with some of my acquaintances asking them to guess how many coffee mugs I discovered upon my most recent move.  Spoiler alert: no one ever - ever - guesses higher than 55.  When I moved, I managed to weed out about half of my collection for donation.  They either didn't fit the above criteria for a quality mug in size and shape or they simply held no special memory for me, marked no particular moment in my life where I wanted a souvenir or a ceramic keepsake.  Naturally I realize that 40+ coffee mugs is still too many for one woman to have - particularly - as I downsize into a New York City shoebox apartment.  But I can't be expected to cut the cord on all my mugs overnight either.  No, instead, I'll keep whittling away as I unpack them, deciding with each kitchen moving box I open which ones stay and which ones go.

While shock and awe is the usual exclamation I hear when I reveal my mug count to friends, I know that I have at least one kindred spirit out there in the land of kitchen coffee mugs.  Over Labor Day weekend, while in between Boston and New York, I stayed at my father's house in New Jersey.  On Sunday morning, while my Dad was still asleep, I got up and went into the kitchen to make coffee.  As I stood over his Keurig waiting for my coffee to brew (into a gray handmade mug, my favorite that he owns) I looked up at the space in between the top of his kitchen cabinets and the ceiling.  It dawned on me, as if I were seeing his kitchen for the first time, that all along the top of his cabinets there were - wait for it - souvenir and keepsake coffee mugs, at least forty of them.

Guess the apple really doesn't fall far from the tree.  Or, maybe the coffee pot in this case.