Over Afternoon Tea

Tea is not only a drink but a ritual over which people have been relaxing, talking, and catching up on each other's lives for centuries. This blog is intended to serve as a virtual cup of tea, helping me keep in touch with friends and family in my physical absence.

Cool Texas mornings, flooded with sunlight, around my grandparents' oval kitchen table. Granny and Gramps in their blue-striped robes, drinking creamy-brown coffee out of blue-striped mugs. The smell of scrambled eggs or "hotcakes" and sausages thick in the air. Happy, contented, holiday-and-full-stomach smiles on everybody's faces, watching the little birds at the bird-feeder. Granny telling us their names in her high, pretty, birdlike voice. Stirring my creamy-brown tea around and around and around, making incessant clinking noises with my spoon that would eventually draw a gentle "girls, don't make so much noise" from some grown-up. The coveted pink mugs, out of which Granny's mother, MamaJ, always had her tea. There were only two, and some lucky great-granddaughter had her tea in the other. My sister and I used to fight over it, so MamaJ went out and bought different ones we liked. But we still liked the pink ones best.
Now, fifteen years or more later, MamaJ is long buried in a pretty spot out in the hill country of Texas. Granny and Gramps moved to a smaller house and gave away some of their things and some of hers. "Is there anything you'd like?" my mom asked.
So when Granny and Gramps came up to Boston for Tiffany's graduation, they brought it with them: a pink-striped floral mug with a bamboo-shaped handle that somehow, along with oriental rugs, plush carpeting, and the smell of Beautiful, represents the character of a woman whose influence on my young character was too deep to be measured. I took it out of the bubble-wrap and suddenly found tears in my eyes. "Look, honey. You can still see the lip-stick stains around the edge."
I wonder if, a hundred years from now, some great-granddaughter of mine will be treasuring this same mug with similar memories, and the shadow of MamaJ will somehow always hover over that cup and all her tea-drinking descendants. I have other heirlooms of her that are less fragile and more valuable, but a little pink-striped mug will always be closest to my heart.