Tea With Carol

My friend Carol, called me on Christmas Eve from her home in Dorset, England. As we spoke I was reminded of this piece I wrote a few years ago, in response to a call out for "Tea Lover" stories. Revisiting it again, brings back many delightful memories of my British buddy, whose warm tea and witty conversation I miss so very much.

I thought I was a tea drinker. Every day I consumed several glasses of that delightful beverage, iced, with a touch of sweetner. So I figured that made me a "tea lover". Then I met Carol.

Carol was from England. She had come to "the states" with her husband and young son and they began attending my church.

Carol was warm and witty, we quickly became close friends. Her husband, Chris was the on-site maintenance supervisor for an apartment complex down the street from our church. I lived on the other side of town. So the convenience of her location, coupled with her welcoming hospitality, made Carol's home a natural meeting place. I could regularily be found sitting in her dining room drinking tea.

Strong hot tea served with milk in sturdy mugs. With her British roots, Carol believed this was the only proper way to serve tea. Adding ice she said, was an insult to the leaves. Compounding this injustice by adding lemon was high-treason. To drink tea without a bit of milk in it, well, only uncivilized peasants did such a thing.

I was not in the habit of putting milk in my tea. Quite frankly I thought it tasted a little weird that way. I would, however, never have offended Carol by asking her to serve it otherwise.

I was unmarried, with a teenage daughter who usually worked on weekends. So, I was frequently invited to Sunday supper at Chris and Carol's home. These suppers introduced me to classic English dishes, like Bangers & Mash and Shepherd's Pie. They also reflected how quickly Carol was becoming a fan of our typical American food fare. She was especially fond of pizza topped with ground beef & pineapple. Which she ate, in proper British fashion, with a knife and fork.

Carol loved baking savory desserts. These were leisurely consumed with pots of tea, on her patio, accompanied by lively conversation and hearty laughter.

I repaid Carol's gastronomic hospitality by chaufferuring her. Carol hated driving in America. Our California freeway system terrified her and she assiduously avoided it. She consistently sought alternate routes and traveled back roads even when doing so took her miles out of her way. So, whenever possible, I would drive for her. Always upon returning her safely home, regardless of the time, she invited me in for a cup of tea. Carol believed that anyone who boldly navigated the treacherous minefield we call a highway needed "bracing up" afterward.

In Carol's eyes, hot milky tea was more than just a thirst quenching drink, it was comfort in a cup. She lit the flame under her copper kettle on hot summer afternoons, as readily as she did on cold winter nights.

When Carol began publishing a church newsletter, I became convinced that her teabags had a supernatural ability for bringing out latent creativity in people. Her vision was to get as many members of our congregation involved in the newsletter as possible. She wanted a "family" paper that everyone related to and felt part of.

To accomplish this, she invited people over to her apartment for a "cuppa" tea. As they sat sipping the steaming brew, friends who did not even know they possessed such talents, were soon drawing cartoons, writing poetry, sharing stories, telling jokes, and jotting down recipes for publication in her monthly paper.

Carol's tea also seemed to have greenhouse properties. Lukewarm tea offended her taste-buds. She could not tolerate her guests drinking it. If her own cup sat long enough to cool off, she gathered up everyone's mugs and poured the contents into her many flower pots. Everything Carol "potted" from philodendrons to orchids flourished. Her patio was shaded by a plethora of leafy-green plants and cacti that she had rescued, restored, or rejuvenated with TLC and a "spot of tea."

Seven years after their arrival in California, a series of circumstances made it necessary for Chris and Carol to return to England. As we packed up belongings she was taking with her and yard saled items she could not take, we shared our last cups of tea together. Those were bittersweet days of reflecting on fun times we would no longer have and looking forward to good things awating her "across the pond".

Our tea got salty as we cried out our final hours together. As I hugged her good-bye, I promised to fly over soon and visit her.

After Carol left, I stopped putting milk in my tea. Even though I had acquired a taste for drinking it that way, I could never seem to get it quite right on my own. Perhaps it needed her British touch to steep properly. Maybe it was simply the company I drank it with that made the difference.

I haven't yet been able to fulfill my parting promise to Carol, but I am eagerly looking forward to the opportunity of doing so. I can think of nothing that would give me more pleasure than once again sharing a hot milky cup of tea with Carol.

Mom's Poinsettias

Mom loves poinsettias. Every Christmas we had them in the house. They were as much a part of our holiday tradition as tinsel and stockings. From the beginning of Advent through the Feast of Epiphany, their red leaf-like blooms greeted us warmly as we came in on cold evenings.

By Valentine's Day the cheerful blossoms had all dropped off and the coffee table held sorry looking stems in faded pots. Dad kept trying to throw them away. Mom, the staunch defender of the pitiful poinsettia, would argue for the plant’s right to bloom again.

“It isn’t dead” she would tell him, “It’s dormant. If we just keep it watered, it will come back to life in the fall.”

So there the ugly thing would sit, gathering dust, until Dad could sneak it out of the house. He usually accomplished this by sometime in July.

This battle of the “lobster flower” went on until the Christmas I was in eighth grade. That was the year that the fate of Mom’s poinsettias was forever altered.


That holiday season there was an epidemic of red leafiness in our living room. It seemed like everyone who came over to offer us a bit of holiday cheer, brought one of the little darlings with them. Each time a new plant appeared, I could hear Dad quietly groan.

By the time the tree was taken down and the ornaments stored away for another year, there were more than half a dozen droopy looking poinsettias gracing the coffee table. Seeing Dad eyeing them deviously, Mom must have sensed she had no hope of holding on to her hoard, without a good survival plan. A few days later, she found one.

The previous summer, my parents had moved us to a new house on a corner lot. As Mom surveyed the large front yard with her botanical eye, she noticed a patch of dirt between the porch and the ivy bed.

“Here,” she boldly announced, “We will plant the poinsettias.”


“What?” replied Dad, somewhat taken aback.


“The poinsettia plants in the living room. I want to plant them, right here.” Mom retorted, in the voice she used when responding to some dim-witted question from one of her children.

“Just imagine how festive and welcoming the house will look when they start blooming again.”

Now Dad was a smart man who knew when he was licked. Shaking his head, he wandered off to find a shovel in the garage as Mom dispatched my sister and me to the house to collect the poinsettias.

Dad was not the handy-man type. Anything remotely resembling a DIY project tended to make him cranky. After a few attempts at “turning the earth” he irritatingly exclaimed, “This soil is too hard to plant anything in.”

Undaunted, Mom sent my little brother for the hose. Quite some time later, after saturating the soil with water, the bedraggled poinsettias were successfully planted.

As Mom stood joyfully admiring her yuletide garden, Dad, having had enough of the whole business disappeared with a newspaper under his arm.

“It will be so beautiful next Christmas?” she gushed euphorically.

By the following Thanksgiving, we realized that Mom’s vision had merit. The once naked stems aligning the front porch began blooming. Just as she had predicted, the house took on a more festive appearance that Christmas.

Mom’s poinsettia patch grew as new plants were added every January.

The winter that my brother was deemed old enough to wield the shovel, brought as much ecstasy to Dad as that first planting had given Mom.

About fifteen years later, Dad retired, the house was sold and my parents moved into a condo. Without Mom’s perennial garden greeting us as we came home, the holiday season lost a little gaiety. We all stopped giving her poinsettias for Christmas.

Now it was December, 1993. I had not thought about Mom’s yuletide plants for a long time. Dad had passed away eight months earlier, after a two-year bout with cancer. I was having a hard time getting into the holiday spirit.

I decided to focus all my energy into making Christmas merry for the youngest members of my extended family. Hoping this would somehow, vicariously infuse my own heart with a bit of cheerfulness.

The baby, Bridget, my little namesake, was only four months old. A few stuffed animals and teething toys would do for her. Sean, aged seven and Joshua, just turning three, were obsessed with Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. Finding action figures and transformers for them was not difficult.

It was my five year old niece, Amanda who was posing a problem. Mandi had lived with my parents since she was a toddler. She and Dad had a particularly close bond. His passing had been confusing and painful for her. I was convinced that the “perfect” gift would make her little heart feel better.

>Mandi loved Cabbage Patch Babies.She was especially partial to the little boy ones. So, Aunty Bridge decided that was what she should have. The Cabbage Patch craze had died down by then, but even at its peak, BOY babies had been hard to find.

I spent weeks searching everywhere I could think of for one. I had been to no less than twelve shopping malls in four cities, without any luck. Now, Christmas was only a few days away. I was running out of time, yet I couldn’t seem to give up the hunt.

Driving across town to see if Toys-R-Us had gotten any since I last checked there, I found myself in familiar territory. Stopping for a red light, I could see the corner-lot house just ahead. As I pulled forward I saw them, Mom’s poinsettias. They had grown taller in the intervening years and their leafy red blossoms engulfed the front porch in radiant, cheerful welcome.

Part of me wanted to hurry past them, to look the other way. But, they drew me, like a honeybee to sweet nectar. I found myself pulling over to the curb for a better view.

Turning off the ignition, I sensed Dad’s presence. His down-to-earth, common-sense voice seemed to be speaking to my troubled heart. “Finding that doll won’t bring me back.” The tears that I had been holding back for weeks erupted like exploding champagne bubbles.

I do not know how long I sat there sobbing out my grief, as memories of Dad and past Christmas celebrations flooded my heart. Nor do I remember what I ultimately gave Mandi as a gift that year.

I do, however, recall buying a poinsettia later that day and placing it on my coffee table, where it proudly sat, until my daughter tossed it out on the Fourth of July.