austin, coffee and dishwashers

I hadn’t cried in a couple weeks, so I guess it was time. It’s always an unexpected, small event that produces my sometimes disproportionately emotional response. This time, it was the dishwasher.

I just moved to Austin on Saturday, and among my few but prized possessions is a blue ceramic coffee mug decorated with a hand painted scene depicting volcanoes, lakes, and palm trees with a cursive Nicaragua adorning a small corner (if mugs have corners….). This mug was a Christmas gift to me from Andrea, my roommate, our first year in Nicaragua, and it became my beverage holder of choice for all the shared mornings that followed. It managed to survive the trip back to the USA, and five different moves around San Antonio this summer. I drank out of it every day, always remembering the many mornings I sat at a small wooden table in Managua, where Andrea and I drank our French-pressed café, talked a lot, laughed, and cried together.

Then, this morning, after my first jog around my new neighborhood, I came back and went looking for this mug to pour myself some already made coffee. After searching the cabinets, it occurred to me that maybe it was in the dishwasher, which one of my roommates had loaded the night before. It was, but when I pulled it out, I was not prepared for what I saw. Half the paint had disappeared, other sections had become distorted, and all that remains in one solitary palm tree trunk and parts of a few leaves. Ni se dice Nicaragua ahora.

I stared at it for a few minutes in disbelief. Then I proceeded to cry. It never occurred to me to tell my roommates that mug shouldn’t go through the dishwasher--I’ve been hand washing everything for years now. And I have a lot of things that I brought back from Nicaragua, which had they broken or disappeared, I might have been fine. But of course, it wasn’t any of those things. It’s one of the things (if not THE thing) that most connects me to my very best friend from those three years we spent together.

So even as I’m excited about all new places, new people, etc. in my life here in Austin, I’m also sad. My damaged mug is a symbolic reminder that things are changing, that I can’t hold on to everything from my life in Nicaragua, and how I choose to adapt to all the changes happening in my life will have a big impact on how things turn out in this new etapa.