When I was little, I wasn’t really into tea parties. I played with friends and cousins who had tea sets, but never really liked them. Often they were plastic, unsuitable for hot tea. Or dirty because the cups had been used to dig in the sand. What was the point, really, if the cups weren’t functional? I do remember, for a short while, that I had a tea set from my grandmother that I used. I liked it much better because I could pour real tea into the cups. It was a bit intimidating, though, because it was a real china tea set—therefore fragile—and was decorated with pink cabbage roses—therefore a bit too frilly for my taste. I’m not sure what happened to that tea set. And I’m not sure whether my brief experience with functional (albeit fussy) tea cups as a child had anything at all to do with my current predilection for tea.
Though I drink tea every day, often several times a day, I have for years functioned with boiling my water in a tea kettle or microwave, brewing my tea cup by cup directly in the vessel that I planned to drink out of. Namely my mug.
I have frequently admired tea pots. I am absolutely in love with the idea of the sublime and ridiculous in tea cozies. But until now, I have not owned a tea pot.
Surprise me, I received birthday treasures in the mail last weekend (what, I wondered, happens to packages destined for areas afflicted by hurricane? what happens to mail when areas are evacuated or destroyed?). My step-mother has been throwing pots for a couple of years, and has sent me the loveliest of surprises, her first tea pot and a set of four cups. I love them. I think they are so fantastic. Beautiful without being the least bit fussy. Dense to hold in the heat. Each cup with enough individual character that each user can know which cup is his or hers.
There is something really lovely about the purposefulness of using a tea pot to brew the tea. It is an extra step that many would find unnecessary or cumbersome. That extra step demands that I slow down, consider the elements of the experience of the tea. The smell, the temperature, the feeling of the steam. I pour the hot water from kettle to pot. I pour the tea from pot to cup. The sound of the liquid falling into the vessel is different at each step. There is a particular sound as the lid of the tea pot slides just a bit when I hold it to pour. A solid, earthy sound, of stone with an echo of life. A cup of tea from a tea pot is a cup of tea to ponder over. A cup of tea to share with a friend.
Come have a cup of tea with me.
;)
Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 1:53PM 
