I've Got A Red Japanese Teapot

I'm cold. I just helped my dad put the plastic up on the porch, and the day has gotten somewhat chilly since then. So I'm making a cup of tea.

I've always liked tea, and I've had a soft spot for herbal peppermint and Earl Grey. I actually made a batch of peppermint iced tea a couple of years ago. It would have been better if I'd used peppermint candies instead of sugar to sweeten it, but it turned out well nonetheless. (I like my mint, and I like it strong.)

But what I've only recently come to appreciate is the fact that tea has its own little ritual. You put the kettle on, pick your flavor, set everything up for the water to boil, pour, steep, sugar etc, and sip. It's oddly comforting now that I think about it. One of the most interesting days I've had was the day I got up, made tea and had a slice of leftover cake from something I missed, and put on some vinyl. It was really cool.

I recently wrote about drinking coffee again. But thinking about it, coffee and tea are more different in my mind than they probably appear to others. I've never made coffee at home, except for the time in college that I used up some old single-cup coffee brewer thingamajiggers and creamed it with that mint chocolate Bailey's that Tim didn't like before heading off to class. Coffee is for the road, tea is for the home. Coffee is public and formal, tea is personal and intimate. Coffee is hanging out, tea is making out.

And now that I've overextended that metaphor to the point of injury, I'm going to go drink my tea.