Treasure

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. 

First Day

Do they look ready?  

Our lives have long run by a seasonal clock, driven by the turning of the school year.  First as chronic students, and then as perpetrators of education, both higher and public, in three states, our lives have always ebbed and flowed semester by semester, graduation by graduation, summer break by summer break.  

In legend and lore, the return to school happens at the end of summer, as nature begins to reach toward fall.  The heat of the summer has passed.  The air is crisp and refreshing.  The leaves are beginning to hint that they might be ready to change color.  I know this because the advertisements for Back to School show shiny-faced young people wearing long pants and sweaters over their cute little t-shirts.  (And has anyone noticed the vests and the bubble dresses and the leggings this year?  It’s like I’m thirteen all over again)

This is not the reality in our world.  We have counted down to the end of summer vacation through the hottest, most stifling time of year for Coastal Texas.  The sea breeze that keeps things bearable the rest of the year often dies for a while in August.  The cooler temperatures during the recent rains, give way to a muggy sauna when the clouds pass.  Even the suggestion of a pair of long pants, let along a jaunty sweater over a scoop-neck T makes me want to melt into a puddle on the spot.  

But it’s time.  

Even without those advertisements and the mountains of school supplies in the aisles, I’d know.

  

I have this (rare) urge to clean the house.  To sweep out the remains of last year’s graduation and prom and football season and second grade.  To turn out the scraps of old lessons and homework.  To gather up the nubs of crayon and let the Sonars turn them into some kind of wax sculpture that will still draw.  Some people have this urge in springtime, I know.  Which, in a place where you’re packed into your house against the cold for several months out of the year, makes sense.  But here, where most of the winter sees us with the doors open wide, running around in our shirt sleeves, the jaunty cardigan slung over the back of the chair just in case, the Springtime just doesn’t feel like a huge shift from what came before.  

Whether it’s coming in August or September, whether I’m in Pennsylvania or South Texas or Southern New Mexico, the start of the school year just seems to be programmed into my blood.  Even before the high school football players start practicing in pads rather than t-shirts, or the marching band starts marching AND playing at the same time, I know it’s coming.  Partner is still in the educational business of course, but I’ve been out of it for the past five years or so.  Just when I thought maybe I’d recover from the pull of the school schedule though, my kids started getting big enough to be school players.  

This year, that’s ‘kids,’ plural.  Both Sonar X8 and Sonar X5 will be attending school.  Their clothes for tomorrow are hanging on the ends of their beds.  They’re tucked in (not sleeping) with butterflies about tomorrow.  

I have butterflies too.  :)

My Weirdness This Week, and Shaun Tan's Gem

My toe is sore today.  Actually it’s been sore for a couple of days because I dropped a glass on it the other night.  I knew it the moment I set the glass down on the corner of my desk.  Actually thought to myself, ‘Don’t put it there.  You’ll knock it over.’  Pah on that inner voice.  I set the glass on the corner of my desk so that I could close the curtain to the right, and turn on the lamp to the left.  As I simultaneously pulled my hand gracefully away from the lamp switch and started to sit down in my chair, I caught the top edge of the glass with my hand and tipped it toward myself.  The contents of the glass splattered first against me (spraying in a sort of arc behind me), then after the glass hit my foot, it spun and sprayed more liquid around in front of me, before bouncing onto the tile and breaking.  

While I screamed ow ow ow ow standing in a glassy puddle on one foot, my lovely Partner got towels and brooms and ice.  I’ll be fine.  It was actually sort of funny.  Did I mention that it was a glass of wine?  Wine that I’d taken barely a sip out of before the spectacular spraying of wine all over the room?  Did I mention that it miraculously missed the computer on its track to soak the tile as well as a towel that has been wedged under the thousand-pound filing cabinet for the last year to keep the metal cabinet from scraping the tile?  Or that there is no way to remove this towel from under the cabinet without emptying the files out of it?  

The living room now has the lingering aroma (thankfully pleasant) of a 2005 Australian Shiraz Cabernet that I really liked and was disappointed to have dropped on my foot.  

Perhaps the fumes led to the next weirdness, which was measuring out a level teaspoon of salt to put in my tea yesterday morning.  No, I realized my mistake before I drank the tea, thank you very much.  

All of this should not, however, cause you to doubt my next enthusiastic endorsement.  We came across Shaun Tan’s The Arrival in the juvenile fiction section of the library last week.  I guess you’d call it a graphic novel, in that there are no words, only pictures.  Don’t assume though that the pictures and its location in the library make it kids’ stuff.  The word that comes to my lips anytime I try to describe it is ‘beautiful.’  

The Arrival tells the story of one man’s journey from his home country to make a new life, first for himself, and later for his family in a magical fictionalized world.  Each page, each panel is filled with magic.  You will choke up when the main character holds the hands of his wife and daughter before boarding the boat.  You will understand the awe, the frustration, the loneliness, the fear, the hope that immigrants must have felt when stepping off the boat at Ellis Island more than a century ago.  The pages are filled with fantastical elements meant to illustrate the foreignness, the exoticness, the seeming magic of this new place.  Also embedded in the pages is the generosity of the shared immigrant experience, the way in which one person helps another through the initial confusion, how each person has a different story that led him or her to this place at this time.  The pictures are shaped with subtle details, small beauties and wonders that you will linger over.  

While perfectly appropriate for young people, it should not be overlooked by adults, who will understand the complex choices we sometimes make to care for our families, who might see reflected, if not one’s own experience, then perhaps that of a parent or grandparent.  A great book to share in any language.

If you enjoyed The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, you’ll love this book.  (And if you’ve never read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, you should go find that one too.)  

Shor'nuff

So I couldn’t stand it one more humid, sweaty minute.  

I went to a very exclusive stylist.  In fact, he is so exclusive that he has cut my hair only one other time.  He is so exclusive that he only has four other clients.  He always uses the most avant garde techniques though.  Last time, he used the electric clippers to crop my locks into an elfish buzz.  This time he reverted to the pinking shears (those zig-zaggy scissors usually used for cutting fabric to sew).  

What?  

Ok, so I talked Partner into cutting my hair (he was reluctant and yes, once, a long time ago, I convinced him to shave my head with the electric clippers; and yes, he did use the pinking shears today, at my insistence).  I pulled it all back into a neat ponytail with two rubber bands and told him to aim between the bands.  That’s it.  No fiddling, no finishing, no evening it out.  It is now a lovely, shaggy bob, longer in the front than the back.  And I think it’s curlier than last time.  Or perhaps it’s just humid.  Ha!  When is it not humid here.  

It’s my first haircut in two years, almost to the date.  If you count the blue tiles in the picture, you’ll see that he cut off a smidge more than a foot of hair, which will be donated somewhere.  I sent my last batch to Locks of Love.  

Oh, and we finished grouting the tile today.  

Raindrops on roses

It’s been raining all day.  It woke me for the first time at six.  It comes in waves: a light, steady rain, punctuated by spells of rain coming down in buckets and sheets.  Our nearest weather station suggests that we have accumulated rain at .36 inches or 9 mm per hour.  I’ve instituted my own rudimentary weather station on the back patio.  It’s a one liter beaker, connected by my brain to a kitchen timer set for one hour.  I’ll let you know.  

The wind is fairly mild now, anywhere from 5 mph (9km/h) up to 27 mph (43 km/h), but is expected to rise as the storm makes landfall down the coast.  This tricky monster has given everyone a bit of a scare.  At first, Dolly was zooming through the Caribbean, hopping the Yucatan peninsula without a backward glance, and zooming through the Gulf of Mexico.  As it got a little closer to landfall (which was forecast anywhere from Tampico, Mexico to Corpus Christ, Texas) it’s speed dropped by more than half, allowing it to grow and develop over the warm, ripe-for-hurricane Gulf waters.  Forecasts varied widely yesterday about landfall time, strength and location, but late yesterday, the meteorological types figured they had it pegged to go ashore at Brownsville, Texas in that city’s first direct-hit in over a decade.  

But whoops.  Fooled you, serious, meteorological types.  Dolly slowed even further, got even stronger, becoming a Category 2 storm (meaning lower pressure, stronger winds) and started hugging the coast, the eyewall gliding along the barrier island, winking at Brownsville as it went by.  

Its eye is more like a gaping maw, opening and closing as it slides up the coast to cross over the barrier island where?  Harlingen?  Raymondville?  Falfurrias?!!

That would be getting a little close for our comfort.  But we should remember that this is Mother Nature we’re dealing with.  The elements of pressure and temperature stirring up the moisture in not-entirely-predictable ways.  We’re still not worried.  We have chocolate and good things to drink and some spicy food to look forward to and best of all, good company.