Once upon a time, a feisty little lady with eyes of blue stained glass who loved trees and mountains, strong filtered coffee and wild, sweet blackberry jam and crisp air, gave me some tea.  The tea was from the mountains she loved the most.  She gave me the tea at a time in her life when her days were drawing shorter and her vision was becoming tunnelled and she was getting fuzzy around the edges.

She gave me the tea because I loved her son, and I guess she thought I always would.  But one day we didn’t love each other so much any more, so I left and I took the tea with me.  I guess it was mine to take.

I moved to Sydney then back to Melbourne, then all over the country, crissing and crossing, and finally up to Queensland, and the tea came with me.  It is a tea that likes travel.

I only drink it once a year, and so I can’t tell if the flavour has changed much.  I don’t know if tea goes stale, I assume it does.  It doesn’t taste stale, but seems different all the same.  Or perhaps it’s me whose tastes have changed as the years flip over and then over again.  The tea seems more mellow, more relaxing, less sharp.  Or perhaps that’s just me.  They say that you can read tea leaves to find out your destiny.  Perhaps your tea can read you too.

It takes a while for the cool of the seasons to set in, up here, from where I perch.  There is no real Autumn, for no trees lose their leaves, but around Easter-time there is a dampness in the mornings and a nibble of cold in the evenings, and you can get the sense that further South it has started to change.  The nights draw in a little, and so I get out the Himalayan tea.

My Himalayan tea has fancy aspirations so I brew it in my Nanna stuff.  A Royal Doulton teapot, and a fine cup and saucer beside it.  Sometimes I use the matching set, and other times I use one of the cups salvaged from one of my Nanna’s homes.  Jean or Marjorie, the ladies I knew well, or perhaps Kathleen, a fine old girl whose mind had gone away before I came on the scene. I also have one from Lesley, that little lead-footed dynamo who is still going strong, and sharp as a tack with her emails and iPads.

The noise of the tea cup on the saucer takes me back to slow days of scones and tea cosies and crocheting and cards.

The whispery tinkle of the tea pouring takes me to a place of warmth and comfort and safety and love.

Today I can feel a tickle or two of cool in the breeze as it ruffles the hairs on my arms and tries to tease them to attention.  Looking down from my writing eyrie I can see a slight change to the blue of the sea, it is moving to grey tones, just like those startling blue eyes did when they started to fade.

Today I will choose a teapot, new.  A gift from a stranger, with a heart as colourful as it’s knitted jacket, and I will sip my tea, grown from a mountain soil that I will never visit.  I will imagine the prayer flags that were laid down with me in mind, and I will wish things to be different.  I will wish that all of these beautiful tea-loving women still walked these living paths.  That they were still here, making fresh brews and fresher stories, rather than these tales in my mind.

…From The Ashers xx

I am writing this blog through tears.

Tears of happysadsurprisejoy.  I’m just so touched.

As you have probably gathered by now, I live a fair bit of my life in my own head, and by extension, on the internet.  Being a blog subscriber, twitter follower, instagram poster and facebook friend suits someone like me.  I like to have opinions, and then force gently express those ideas to others.  So commenting on posts, and then eventually writing a blog is a natural fit for me.  I can rant and rave, wail and keen, judge and laugh, and then press “publish”.  Much cheaper than therapy, and easier than alienating everyone I know IRL with my nonsense.

So you probably heard my mate died four weeks ago.  Those weeks are a bit of a blur.  I know I carried on a fair bit, on this, my little home on the interwebs, and probably a lot more on the other Soc’s.

Three weeks ago, a wonderful chick I follow, BabyMacBeth posted a pic on Insta of a teapot, with the caption “KirstiMelville this is for you x”.   It was the day of Hayley’s funeral.

Hayley loved teapots and, as she would say, “cutesy” things.  Hayley also loved BabyMac.  We would often talk about  BabyMac’s recipes, and her warm and comfy blog, where it’s all: sit down, put up your feet, pour yourself a cuppa and lets have a chat.  We loved BabyMac’s blog, and we thought that maybe we would do some blogging together, Hayls and I.  She could do the recipes and the food styling, and I could write some stuff.  I dunno what, being a culinary bogan and all, but I thought I could knock something together.

So when Beth posted the pic, of a teapot that is a bit similar to a teapot I once bought Hayls, I got right on and hijacked the photo that was meant for Kirsti.  I said “My friend Hayley who loved you Beth and collected teapots would have adored that pic.  It’s her funeral today.  I’m looking at that with tears and thinking of all the cuppas we shared, and all the ones we now won’t.”

Beth and Kirsti and FauxFushsia were gracious and caring and said they would raise their teacups to Hayls that day.  I’m a bit embarrassed that I did that now, butted in and put my own grief onto a post that was meant for someone else.  To be honest I hardly even remember doing it, such was the cottonwool of my brain that day.

Then today something unexpected arrived in the post for me.

I can hardly believe it.

If I was BabyMac, I would say: Have you EVER?

A teapot.  With a cosy.   And a touching note from Beth.  A person I have never met, in real life.  My heart doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and my eyes are saying, “do both, do both”.  My brain is overcome with the happy-sadness of a lost friend and the kindness of a stranger.  Someone who doesn’t know me, but who I feel I know.

This teapot is a teapot for one.  I will drink from it tonight, and think of my one.  The one that I could say my things to, plan my bits with, think out loud with, and laugh until I feared I might let out a little bit of wee with.  I miss you Hayls.  And BabyMac?  Words just can’t explain.  That teapot has broken and mended my heart.

So cutesy.