What is Teatime? from Thomas Hardy's Kitchen Table

What is Teatime?

I would mention silence and an open casement window.

Tools of an impossibly miniature trade—sugar cube tongs with mouths like baby seashells. Canisters gasping for air though ironically sealed for international travel. 

Dried then aged tendrils (tea leaves) gathered from the map’s broadest coordinates—handled gingerly against loss on local floors. 

Spoons petite enough to fit five into an average spice jar. 

The metronome hypnotism of the cling on each side of a ceramic mug. 

A gallery of flavors in decorative containers nestled somewhere between perfumer and disheveled apothecary. 

Fumbling among a collection of stacked china—-from mini to giant size before the thin dense whistle of propane on a switch sets a kettle ablaze. 

Graham Greene says of a character’s love: “She was the hiss of steam…she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.” (The Quiet American). Teatime is that rest.

Rest to pull back the telescope lens on the arenas of our lives and watch them stirring without our participation. 

The clattering teeth of air streams up into the radiator’s lungs. 

Teatime gives a satisfying thud of heavy wooden doors between you and the ‘life world’ you inhabit.

Gurgling boiled water tumbles as an introduction onto shyer tea leaves huddled for comfort. Hard to know; shall we sing, break into dance, or fall into chant quiet at this? 

Perhaps all are appropriate in honor of such a multicultural unity. 

Appropriate should you choose. 

Teatime asks nothing of its participants in return. 

Choose your flavor or type of blend. 

Sit down, relax your limbs to feel yourself in this place. 

Fill the kettle, turn the gas to light. Invite friends, learn hospitality, be alone. Have cookies, biscuits,

sandwiches or no food—tea straight up. 

It asks for no transformational oaths. 

Requires no translations by anyone of higher authority to their fellow people.

You don’t have to wear pearls or vacuum sealed shoes. 

You don’t have to cheer for the labored snap of linen cloth, like sails exiled on land, adorning the table.

Tea ennobles the soil and its youngest offspring with the mantles of history. 

Teatime is prayer outside of religious boundaries.  

Tea has a world of passport stamps and every flag nourishes its patchwork legends. 

Embrace the serenity of tea as solitary routine, or its communal path to invigorate friendship.    

Teatime can be so exacting in its rituals it invites us to whimsy.

Teatime is everything our days are not. Drinking a warm cup of tea allows that clean slate to restore our energy to keep going.