Tea Autobiography
Katherine Edgren
Who can nap with London outside? I get up, luxuriate in a narrow tub, wrap myself in a white towel, sit a cup of complimentary tea. The thick aroma climbing into my brain tells me I’ve never really tasted good tea. It’s the 4th of July. That night our sleep is interrupted by drunken patriots on the floor above us singing “America the Beautiful.”
The second is in Beijing, part of a lavish breakfast buffet in our hotel. Jasmine. Floral. Intricate ornamental visions behind my eyes. I drink this reviving essence from a thin white china cup and saucer. Fortify with cup after cup of seduction. We walk the Great Wall that day, visit the pearl factory and the jade store—big as supermarkets.
Years later, in Ann Arbor, at a former gas station transformed into a Middle Eastern restaurant with lousy service but good food, lunching with a dear friend seems an occasion to try the small rice pudding for dessert with a hot cup of tea. The cold, sweet texture married with hot astringence is a revelation.
Drinking tea this morning, I vow to buy only the expensive kind from now on. I can get it at By the Pound, and it’s not heavy. Merrill told me she’s shopping for decaf Jasmine tea for her Chinese New Year’s Party, to go with dessert. She texted to say she’s found regular jasmine, jasmine curls, oolong, and dragon, but is still looking, enjoying the challenge.
After weeks of dizzy spells that flattened me on the couch or the floor, the neurologist and cardiologist told me only one cup of caffeine per day. I have mine at breakfast. So bracing it almost grows hair on my chest! Before being relegated to decaf, I used to have Earl Grey with caffeine every afternoon with two squares of darkest chocolate. I remember chuckling to myself at how a friend declared Earl Grey to be an afternoon tea, not a morning tea. La-di-da.
I remember cups of tea with an English lady whose house I cleaned one summer when I was in college. Afterwards, she’d invite me to sit at her kitchen table with tea and good chocolate and tell me about dancing on the table in London, about her youth before marrying her Spanish husband, gone now.
I’ve learned to make a perfect cup of tea in my one-cup pot. Always bringing the water to boil before steeping, using a timer to be sure I steep it the perfect amount. Not a purist, I add ½ a teaspoon of honey to my brew, because life is too bitter.
Tea is better than beer.
It may not loosen the mouth,
but it warms the chest.
Katherine Edgren
Katherine has two books of poetry: Keeping Out the Noise, (Kelsay Books) and The Grain Beneath the Gloss, (Finishing Line Press,) plus two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Coe Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Light, Hanging Loose Press, Orchards Poetry Journal, The Brussels Review, Third Wednesday, among others. She headed up a department at University Health Service, and served as a Project Manager through the University of Michigan, and as an Ann Arbor City Councilmember. She is a retired social worker and a grandmother of four.