Morning Tea

Having been feeling a bit mopey and sluggish these past few days, I decided that what I needed to get going this morning was a nice cup of black tea. Wanting to cheer as well as caffeinate, I pulled a special tea pot from my china hutch.

You see, my mom, despite not liking tea all that much, has always been a collector of tea pots. She has around 40 or so of them now and growing up, I would find ways to get to antique stores, estate sales or thrift shops and hunt down a tea pot for my mom for special occasions such as birthdays and Christmas. I have a lot of memories tied to a lot of her teapots because I always wanted to find the perfect one.

Now that I'm older and enjoy tea, I have a very modest collection of teapots myself. I've managed to collect a grand total of... two. A Japanese clay tea pot and a vintage Humpty Dumpty teapot whose glaze is cracking and is unusable in his present state.

When my mom threw a going away party for me at her house I spent a lot of the afternoon wanting to ask her if I could take one of the teapots with me. There was one in particular that I wanted, but after gazing at the collection several times I couldn't find it. I remember picking it up at an antique store that I still love for her birthday at least 15 years ago. The thing that made this teapot so memorable was that I bought it for her because I liked it so much myself.

I was getting ready to go home and finish packing later in the day. My mom walked me to my car and pulled something out of her back seat on the way down; the teapot! Somehow, with her motherly intuitions, she had decided a few days prior that she was going to give me that one when I left and had taken it down to wash it and wrap it for me.

This would be the teapot I used this morning to cheer myself up with my tea.