Tea

(In response to a 'prompt' to write about 'tea'.)

                                                            Tea

 I don’t like tea.

The warm soft rush of coffee puts the world in place for me each morning and keeps me upright for the rest of the day. I used to drink about nine cups from dawn to dusk.  This was in the days when everyone wasn’t so enamored of “healthy living,” you know, when we were all freer, shorter-lived I guess but probably happier. I smoked back then not realizing that that was not a good idea. Mild COPD established I quit cigarettes at last and the daily intake of coffee also dropped to about three luscious cups a day. Proud of having taken that step eighteen or so years ago I still miss the great conversations fueled by that enlivening, expanding catalyst of coffee and a smoke late into the night. What worlds we conquered, what weighty problems solved breathing smoke and sipping brown elixer. Oh yes, a purist, I always drink it black!

Unlike tea, grown in endless sheltered rows along protected mountain sides in India and China, picked by gentle female hands in the early morning, coffee was discovered by rough goatherds along wild hills in Ethiopia. Watching, intrigued by the way their herds, wearied by the long trek to pasture suddenly seem to come alive, playful, almost dancing, as they munched the low green berried plants that grew there, they, too began to nibble and chew. Word spread, experiments were tried and in time the lovely vibrant liquid became a favored brew among the sophisticated intelligentsia of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Coffee houses popped up everywhere, home to exciting conversations lasting far into the night.  Revolutions were planned and aborted, gossip, rampant, made reputations and destroyed them between sips, books were planned and scientific theories probed and proved. Reaching eventually to the Americas, thank god, paired with the intoxicating leaves of the tobacco plant the wonderful addictive practice that I delighted in was born. Healthier now, of course, I may still indulge in half my passion and do so, tasting and toasting memory each time I lift the cup.

I do not like tea.