HI 55/ LO 26, rain showers
“Men drink, women get depressed.”
I read this quote recently in a book. And although I’ve known women who drink and men who get depressed, I get the point.
Friends, if you don’t mind me asking, have you tried tea?
The curative power of tea is astounding. Especially when you buy loose tea that must be put into a strainer (mine is a Mickey Mouse one from a dear friend), must be brewed with water at just the right temperature. And then you must wait.
Once the tea is ready, it’s hot, so you can’t chug it. You must sip.
Because my local H-E-B carries some nice tea, I have not bought a lot of the good stuff in recent years, although I do have two varieties of loose greens from Der Kuchen Laden, a local retailer. My dad gives me occasional packages from The Tea Embassy in Austin, Texas. But lately, my friend Carolyn has been keeping me supplied with tea from an online retailer. At the moment, here are the varieties in my tea cabinet from her: white pear, white blueberry, white peach, white tropics, jasmine chun hao, white monkey, gunpowder, green pekoe, pomegranate green, apricot green, mango green and citron green.
On days when “depressed” seemed like too mild a word, when alcohol seemed like a dangerous element to insert into an unstable environment, I had tea. All I wanted. If I had tea, I could write, and if I could write, I knew I’d be OK.
I brought tea along with me in the car, to the store, to difficult meetings. I bought more when I found it on sale: Ultimate Green, peach-ginger, cherry rose green, labyrinth blend with serene herbs. That last one’s label reads, “The labyrinth is not a maze. There are no tricks to it and no dead ends. It has a single circuitous path that winds its way into the center. The path is in full view, which allows a person to be quiet and focus internally.”
That is what tea does, even if it’s the strong, black kind. No mazes. No tricks. No dead ends. There and Back Again.