Craving Tea

There is really very little I want in life on a material scale. Long ago, I made a short list of the “things” I needed to acquire to live a full life. And, over the years, I have whittled away at that list, crossing items off as I get them. Miraculously, I have never felt the urge to even consider adding something to the list.

Until today. A friend gave me a small salmon-colored box of flowering tea, with the subtitle “leaves of art.” There are six hand-sewn balls that are intended to blossom when they are steeped in boiled water. She says she only knows two people for whom this present would be perfect and the other one lives across the Atlantic in Iceland, so I am the official recipient of those one-inch balls of potential beauty.

But how can I properly witness the unfolding of this beauty without a glass teapot, which I don’t have. Over the years I have had two teapots—a clunky brown earthenware one I bought at a yard sale, and a blue-and-white fancy French one from my great aunt via my mother, who never used a teapot in her life.

My mother was a bag woman. Every morning she made a cup of Lipton in some shade of a blue mug that matched her blue kitchen (tablecloth, curtains, dishtowels, plates—and mugs). From an early age, I knew that drinking tea was a right of passage from childhood into the world of real adults. As soon as I was deemed old enough—somewhere in high school—every morning and every evening I drank tea with my mother at the kitchen table.

When I moved to the country and made my own life with my own family, I transitioned from commercial black tea in bags to loose leaves of comfrey and mint and nettle that grew in the fields and gardens outside my kitchen door. I never knew why I stopped drinking tea when I moved from the country back to a city, but perhaps it was just that: no gardens, no fresh leaves.

I gave away my clunky pot, and the antique blue one is packed away. It seems destined to become a family heirloom—there are precious few of those.

Ten years have passed and this winter I have been craving tea. I started buying hibiscus, pineapple and ginger, spring cherry, and my current favorite, licorice root.

I am no tea connoisseur. Honestly, I’ve never been a connoisseur of anything. Often it takes me a while to figure out exactly what I like, particularly when it comes to how things taste. I am the child who waited for the last dregs to emerge at the bottom of the cereal bowl so that I could slurp up the sugary residue that had settled there. Clearly mine was never a discerning palate.

But I am a person who recognizes when it is necessary to make changes, to alter the plan, and so today I am adding one more thing to my essential list—I need a glass teapot for my flowering tea of leaves of art. Well, not exactly “need.” I could make this tea in a cup or a bowl, even the one remaining canning jar that followed me from my old life.

I could. But I don’t want to. And so I won’t.

Annaliese Jakimides’ poems, essays, and short fiction have been published in magazines, journals, and books, as well as broadcast on public radio. Most recently, her work was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize.