Tea for Three

“I’ll be mother” = a British expression meaning to pour the tea.

Not to be mistaken with the American expression “to spill the tea,” which means to tell the hot gossip.

The thing that I like about staying at my parents house is the quiet. There’s no screaming or yelling or chatter, so you can read a book in the living room or have tea at 4 in the afternoon if you want. The other day was a perfect example of this: it was Sunday, I slept in, I watched some more of the limited series I’d been watching, and then I had my friend Anna over, just to catch up.

Anna and I had made plans to make bon-bons that day, but after playing with the cats and clearing away some of the dishes, we realized that we weren’t ready to get all of the ingredients out and embark on a two day baking process just yet. The older I get, the more that I think I want calm interactions with my friends, and the older I get the more in control of that I feel. I was feeling tired but relaxed and that put me in the mood for tea. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a tea-not-coffee kind of girl.

My suggestion was that we have a casual tea party, if such a thing exists. We selected some tea from our collection and then we cleaned out the pantry looking for some snacks to go with it. My mother joined us and she was mother (see above to understand that reference).

The spread that we came up with was pecans, chocolate, and some savory chips that my mother insisted tasted like rosemary, although that might have just been the influence of the tea. We had cats sitting in our laps and playing at our feet, while I was drinking tea that tasted like rose petals.

Overall, we talked about politics and our personal lives and then there weren’t any other topics to cover. There never really is. Anna, wearing the Cheetahs in a patch of flowers Hawaiian shirt and “Taylor-Swift-folklore-album-sweater” combo, is a cooking extraordinaire, who treated us all to a dinner of tikka-masala. She made it, while I mostly sat around doing homework and watching the runoff debate. I loved the down time I spent and how mellow I felt. One of the nice things about quarantine has been how I can make myself tea and lay back at home. I intend to do so much more of this as the weather grows colder.