Leaded or unleaded?

They are ceramic, or hard vinyl, with a picture of a pheasant, a bugling elk or a bass dancing on its tail over lily pads.

If the cups are ancient, the images appear foggy as old headlights.

They aren’t considered openly, these coffee cups we keep. We sip from them without paying them much mind, except in the morning when the coffee pot beeps and the liquid is poured into them under a halo of steam and heat.

Their meaning feeds us then, subconsciously. It tells us to be outside under a dripping cedar bough waiting for deer to sneak out of a canyon; to be watching our wake as we idle from the harbor; to be casting in front of a rock where the current runs through the shade, or climbing, or hiking or birdwatching.

It is with the whispering voice of an old pal that they nudge us.

My coffee cups are covered in trout flies. But only one per cup, because I keep it classy.

Inside these coffee-carrying orbs with the handles usually big enough to make room for a few fingers, a stain dark as a chestnut paints the ceramic.

It glosses the inside of a favorite cup that dons a caddis fly and was part of a set.

The Royal Wulff cup too, is used on occasion, but the Adams, once a top choice, has been glued like a mosaic after a wreck.

My daughter, a while back, walked off with the chartreuse humpy that probably imitated a green drake and when I see her my mantra is always the same.

“Take care of that cup,” I tell her.

There are forces about, often in the form of relatives, spouses maybe, who want to snatch these cups from under the car seat, or the shop bench or from their hiding place behind the computer module on the office desk, and soak them in the dishwasher, so they appear new again.

But that defeats the purpose doesn’t it?

The coffee tannins, days, weeks or months worth, imbue our cups with a certain essence and the distinction of being seasoned. They mark time.

Each stratified layer is from a morning in which we watched the steam rise while considering ambient temperature, wind chill, currents, hatches, rubs and scrapes, gobbles, yelps, wallows or swales, and tree stands, before the impending commute to work.

Each thin veneer is a promise.

These are not stains, by any stretch, but dreams, however brief, the sediments left by thoughts of being out there, and the affirmation that we will again.

Soon.

We hope.

Someone gave me a Ray Troll cup once that showed gargantuan Pacific salmon grinning near the rim, with the caption, “There’s no nookie like a chinookie.”

It broke after falling from the dashboard on a bumpy road and tangling with a hydraulic jack I kept on the floorboards for reasons I don’t remember.

The cup was cheery, combining wit and the comic enthusiasm with which we sometimes view our outside exploits. It was almost too smart for the morning Joe.

The fall from the dashboard killed the Troll cup. When I got another later, of smallmouth under a Bass Ackwards design, I vowed to care for it, but it cracked too, under similar circumstances. I bound the breaks with super glue and deemed the cup unuseable for beverages, filling it instead with pens, which later turned its insides blue.

A better fit, I think.

We don’t talk openly about these cups, but we consider them down deeper. Each morning when our brains work at 12 wave cycles per second these cups speak to us, their tannin layers remind us of time passing, and times past. Their pictures tell us stories of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

And the stuff inside of them, the mud, the dirt, the go juice, the wakey up and cuppa brew, it’s just the fuel we say will get us there.

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Contact staff writer Ralph Bartholdt at rbartholdt@cdapress.com