tea

not so wordless wednesday postcard

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

Dear Newfoundland Crafters Guild Women:

You may not remember me. I stopped by one of your places on the side of the road about a decade or so ago, wandered the few aisles in a sort of barn-like building with folding tables laden with homemade this and thats. A few of you sat in chairs drinking tea and knitting, chatting amongst yourselves, asking me if I was alright my dear… and if I needed any help to just give you a nudge. I bought this tea cosy for I haven’t a clue now how much… probably not nearly enough. A few dollars. I’ve used it goodness knows how many times since then. (How many times is almost every day for a decade?)

This was also the holiday of invading fog as we sat happily enough (and innocently) on the shoreline rocks with a glass of wine, possibly bread and cheese too, and then, looking up over the water the fog coming in at a pace and thickness like I’ve never seen before. A vast platoon of cold grey air that obliterated everything as it went, and us sitting there mouths full of cheese like targets. Soon it would be all around us and we’d never be able to get off the rocks safely, we’d never find our footing, never know what was land or water. So we scrambled like crazy while we could still see. Ran to the B&B we were staying at and no sooner landed on the porch than the fog was on us and you couldn’t see a metre in front of you. That we survived makes it one of the best memories ever.

Also the same holiday when I sat on a hillside at Petty Harbour, watched a few boats coming in and wrote a poem about the women who waited in those little outports; I wondered how many times they’d held their breath until they saw their chap’s boat return while at the same time enjoying a certain temporary freedom and community with each other.

Petty Harbour

They hide in square wooden houses
the women of the boatmen, leaning
on each other’s shadows, thighs
pressed together against the fog
until—all but one returns; thighs
loosen for a moment before they’re
alone, immersed in salt and gravy,
hiking cloud paths for berries to send
with him next time; yet for the one
whose boatman doesn’t return—
thighs loosen and life begins.

Anyway, I just wanted to say, dear crafter women, somebody made a pretty incredible tea cosy. And thank you. And I want you to know that I think of you often, your knitting and your chatting and willingness to be nudged in that barn with its hot beverages and cookies on offer and I am grateful for you and for women everywhere who work at these seemingly simple tasks to raise funds for hospitals and schools and families in need and how I”m not sure you realize what an enormous chunk of the planet you hold up…

I just want you to know this is what I sometimes think when I have my tea.

 

 

♦

Other (not always) wordless friends:

Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Elizabeth Yeoman

 

nova scotia, part one: one perfect pot of tea

~ carin ~ 13 Comments

 

My favourite kind of travel is the kind that meanders me down side streets where there are no attractions, where the door of a tea shop invites me to sit at a sunny window and read the local paper while enjoying the perfect blend of leaves and ambience and ambient conversation.

Where there’s a table of older people and two tables of younger people and every single one of them strikes me as someone worth talking to. A woman comes in and gets a cup of tea to go, a few minutes later, a man arrives to pick up a large paper sack containing an order of various teas, his personal stock is running low he says. He chats with the owner, who explains that he’s leaving for India soon (I don’t catch the name of the place) to visit his tea farmers and attend the wedding of a farmer’s son.

Later, when I’ve finished reading and eavesdropping and sipping, I get up to pay and I ask the owner, Philip, about his upcoming Indian tea farm travels and… well… the conversation goes on for some exceedingly happy time about ethical practices and the choice to support small growers rather than large companies, the difference in quality, the science and pleasure of blending leaves, the art of using natural flavours rather than synthetics.

Philip tells me that last time he was in India he helped with the planting of tea bushes, that the farmer whose son is getting married is his mentor, that he’s learning everything he can and that he hopes one day he’ll be able to plant tea in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.

He doesn’t have to tell me this is a lifestyle, that he doesn’t sell tea to get rich. In fact he nearly went bankrupt when the city closed his street for construction one summer.

By the time I leave I’ve had a fabulous mini tea course. (I thought I knew tea. Turns out I know next to nuthin’.)

As with everything, what I learn most is how much there is to learn.

At home a week later I brew a pot of the same blend and the smell of it, the taste, is as gorgeous as I remember and… presto!… just like that I’m right back in that sunny window on a side street in Halifax.

Which is my second favourite kind of travel.

♥

Click on more Nova Scotia!

Nova Scotia: Two Hammocks

Nova Scotia: Three Gardens

 

yes, deer… tea

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

 

So I’m at a place. A place where I have just ordered a cup of tea. Not a coffee shop but a café-ish, snack-ish place in a high end facility of high-end art.

Wait. Let me start again. I have NOT ordered a cup of tea. Not quite yet. There’s a couple ahead of me who have ordered an Americano and a latte and the ‘beverage maker’ is tending to said order with an inordinate amount of flourish, twirling and dramatic gesture. It’s a production, a real bean-fueled drama, complete with intensity of face, a body one with the urns, flicking this way then flicking that. The only sound is the whooshing of steam. Whooooosh. We, the audience, are silent, some of us possibly in awe.

The whole thing seems a titch overblown but then I’m not a coffee drinker.
I stifle my inclination toward cranky cynicism at this point and consider the value, the ‘art’, of preparation instead…

The whole thing takes time.

Finally the coffees are served and the Americano and latte couple leave. It’s my turn. I step up to the counter.

“I’d like a cup of tea please.”

[cue the crickets]

The visual is this: picture a deer in the headlights. This artistse of foam and froth just stares blankly, no words, and then…

“Tea??” he asks in a tone that suggests concern, like maybe I’m making a rash decision.

“Yes,” I confirm.

He takes a cup and sticks it under a tap labelled ‘hot water’, drops in a teabag, shoves it in my general direction. “There you go.”

I laugh—part amusement, part delirium from having stood in line this long—and say I was hoping for a bit more ‘art’, and he, all seriousness and java wisdom says: “Nope, tea’s real simple.”

Real simple indeed.

It occurs to me that it would be pearls before swine to enlighten him… I make a mental note instead that next time I’m in the snack place of the high-end facility of high-end art, I’ll do us all a favour and just have a V-8.
622PX-~1