The Constancy of Tea And a Poem by Megan Willome on Tea
It hits me as I make my second cup of tea for the day that through the ups and downs of my interesting life, the only thing that has remained fairly constant and seen me through it all is my love of tea. In my country, “tea” is any hot beverage ranging from the more ubiquitous black tea, “healthy” green tea, expensive flavoured tea, black or green coffee, or a sleep-inducing cocoa drink. A mum could casually ask her toddler if he will drink “tea” and then proceed to make him a warm sippy-cup of Milo in hopes that he’ll finally fall asleep afterwards and let her finish the bloody laundry. There is a wide range of options as to what “tea” could mean, but I have always loved each and all of them, at different times and to varying degrees.
As far back as I remember, tea has always been there for me, helping me through the day, giving me pockets of comfort here and there, pacifying my stomach on days when I had no appetite for food. And there have been many of such days, sometimes following each other back to back. When I was a little girl, I didn’t care very much for food. I found chewing awkward — I was always getting scolded for chewing too quickly or too loudly or too slowly and I was tired of the mechanics of the whole thing. I also thought it was a stressful process and activity. A lot of time would be spent bent over the smoking kerosene stove than I felt was necessary and then breakfast or lunch or dinner would be served in our house. Sometimes it would happen later than other times, depending on how well the stove behaved this time. And then so many things could go wrong with the food! No matter how careful you were, there would always be something wrong with it to somebody in my family of six kids and two parents. Too salty for someone, not enough pepper for another, blah blah blah.
Then the eating! We were all taught the importance of eating “three square meals” a day, every day. It has become a standard unit for the measurement of affluence or something, so it is clearly very important. Sitting down at similar times every day and chewing and swallowing food whether or not you were really in the mood to was one of my least favourite things to do. All that time wasting away! And when you were eating you had to sit still or else get scolded again for running, dancing, talking or doing anything but sitting while eating.
“If you eat while standing, the food will flow into the ground.”
“If you swallow those orange seeds, an orange tree will grow out of your tummy and the branches will come out through your mouth and ears and eyes.”
“You have to lean forward when eating cashews because the juice will stain your clothes and never come off.”
And in all of these, one thing remained constant about eating anything; you had to be sitting down or obediently positioned in one place. With drinking, the rules were a bit more lax. The only one I took seriously was avoiding spillage when enjoying a nice cup of tea while reading one of the many books I learned to take pretty much everywhere with me. I had discovered that since eating was such a boring, monotonous chore, I could spice it up by vanishing mentally into a strategically placed open book, relying purely on muscle memory to power through the meal, shovelling food at frequent intervals from the plate to my mouth without me having to take my eyes off the book. With drinking, I had only to place the cup a safe distance from the pages and assume whatever position felt most comfortable, righting myself every now and then to consume the sweet, hot, warm or cold liquid till the very last drop.
Tea was there in my blue sippy cup almost every day as a toddler. As I grew bigger, I began to use the cup without its white cover — I was a big girl now and did not need to drink out of the white spout. I could sip from the rim of the cup like every other person now. Tea was there aged 5, standing in the gap of compromise between my no doubt exhausted mother and me after I had refused to eat any of the things she tempted my appetite with.
It was there in secondary school when I often yearned to be able to survive solely on drinking sugary liquids. Every meal I could, I would eat with a cup of tea to make the feeding process easier. It was there to warm me up when I came home from school drenched by rain, wet to the skin and trying to shiver the goosebumps off my cold, clammy skin.
It was there so much in my first proper relationship that months after we broke up, he smiled tenderly into my eyes and commented on how I was the only one he knew who drank so much tea, and who would make it piping hot and then take delicate sips with a teaspoon until the cup was half empty. I had blushed deeply then, not only because he happened to say it just as I was ferrying a teaspoonful of tea into my mouth, but also ashamed and angry because something so cheesy had affected me that much.
Tea was there when my ulcer pains ate deep into my stomach and the usual drugs stopped working as well as they used to. It seemed to pacify the destructive spirits living in the depths of my belly, at least for a little while, enough time for me to rest from the angry, empty pain that kept me sitting up and crying late into the night.
It was there when I began experiencing deep pangs of what I called mourning pain, when I thought a lot about how unfair it was that I had lost my dad so early in life. I would have periods when everything would begin to look gloomy from the inside out. I would feel heavy and tired, as though I had a thick blanket of rain clouds above my head alone.
Tea was there when I began having irregular sleep patterns and I would calculate the lengths of my insomniac nights by how many cups of tea I had to drink before the sleep came back. It was there when I broke up with another boyfriend for the first time (we broke up several times) and I was convinced my eyes would never again have enough water to produce any more tears.
It was a much needed oasis when I had demanding days at work, easing out tension through my pores, carried by drops of sweat. Tea saved me when my sleeping habits got worse and the cloud of sadness above my head grew bigger and darker.
If my life were a Hollywood production, there would be a soulful montage of all my most memorable teacups. There would be footage of me in different outfits, sometimes dancing, sometimes crying, sometimes smiling contentedly, sometimes shaking with sudden hunger, but always going through the same soothing, reliable motions it takes to make a nice cup of tea.
Here’s this poem by Megan Willome that I stumbled upon and I enjoyed:
Valentine’s Chai
Sitting in a sunny café, I call my parents
because I can’t stand to hear
bad news at home.
So I call from here, on my cell,
armed with chai.
She’s telling the doctor, No more.
She will leave his office with some pills
that will lengthen her sweet tooth in time
for Valentine’s Day.
I quaff my tea and head to the store
for candy hearts, chocolate hearts,
Reese’s peanut butter hearts, heart-shaped
cookies piled with icing — any
confectionary way to say I love you I love
you I love you I love you I love you.
— Megan Willome, author of The Joy of Poetry
