that's mrs. mediocrity to you

I love tea. I don’t think I could start my day without it. Well of course I could, but it would be ugly.

It isn’t just the tea I love, but also the ritual of it. It is calming each morning to go through the motions of a ritual that has become part of who I am. It grounds me.

And I love my old Fire King and Russell Wright tea cups that are the perfect size, the perfect weight, for the perfect cup of tea. They just feel right in my hand. It is amazing how attached we can get to things. Things like a tea cup.

The things I get most attached to seem to fall into the antique/vintage category. (Except for my Blackberry which has recently attached itself to me like an appendage.) But I fall in love with tea cups. Old tools. Watering cans. Things that have been used over and over again and lived to tell the tale.

Of course they don’t tell us their tale, we have to make one up for them, but that is part of the fun. I love to wander into a booth in an antique shop that is filled with nothing but tools. All so well worn, but still so useful. I love trying to figure out what they were used for. I recently bought an old wrench with a curved handle. I fell in love with it. I don’t know why, but I had to have it. And I will use it. Most of the tools I own were passed down to me by my father and some were his father’s. I still use my dad’s old hammer even though the handle is ready to split. But these tools have character. They have been used to fix things for decades. I like that.

We don’t fix things any more. When they break we throw them away. It’s not entirely our fault, that’s the way things are made these days, but it makes me a little sad. When our kids, our grandchildren grow up, what will they find in antique stores? My Blackberry? Or my Jadeite Fire King tea cup? Or that wrench I just purchased? Are we missing something? Our ability to pass things down to future generations?

Just think, in a hundred years someone else could be sipping tea from this very same cup.

Unless, of course, someone breaks it.