THE END.

She typed finality across the center of the page and closed the laptop with a snap.

What would it be this morning? She turned to her tea cabinet and opened it quietly. Maybe a green jasmine. She could tweet about it later and make Megan smile. Megan would have tweeted something about a new Earl Grey, and they would share fantasies about each other’s kitchens and tea cups. Or did Megan use a mug?

This would explain it. Why she typed, “The End.” This lack of attention to detail. Shouldn’t she know by now what Megan took her tea in? Hadn’t she read a few hundred tweets or more, about English Breakfasts and new green blends, a white tea for afternoon, and a cataloging of how many cups Megan had drunk by 9 pm? She had. Over and again, she had.

But she could not recall Megan’s imbibing-receptacle-of-choice. A novelist would remember these things. She would even be willing to research about tea, wouldn’t she? To create a believable character based on Megan? An authentic character who knew her basic pekoes from her golden tippys?

Novelists were like that. The real ones, anyway. The ones that Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa wrote about in Letters to a Young Novelist. Flaubert, Proust, Thomas Wolfe.

She hadn’t made it past page 5 in Proust, had gotten hopelessly lost in his detailed descriptions and a vague sense that maybe he was in love with his mother. Really in love. Like maybe he would like to nurse again, but not quite like that. This could be wrong. She could have heard that somewhere and not picked it up by page 5 at all.

And had she even read Wolfe? She couldn’t remember that either, beyond what Vargas Llosa quoted, which she had just read on Monday. Thomas Wolfe likened the life of a writer to being infected by a worm that fed on his insides.

A worm?

It got worse. Vargas Llosa loved this image, had thought of it himself and was simply quoting Wolfe to say, You see? Being a writer is like having an insatiable parasite inside you.

Vargas Llosa’s worm was a tapeworm, and he had rolled out a few anecdotes about real people with real worms, including a few nineteenth-century ladies who purposely swallowed tapeworms that would eat their insides out, for the sake of social effect—along the lines of impressing the in-crowd with their stunningly slender waistlines.

She hated worms. Her own German grandmother had strung them on fishing lines, turned them loose by the hundreds in her garden, even smashed the “bad” ones between her thumb and middle finger, until their green insides popped out like a bilious pearl.

Laura put her hand to the edge of the granite countertop, feeling suddenly sick. A light sweat broke out across the back of her neck and a warmth spread through her limbs.

She’d better sit down on the floor, right here. Maybe someone would find her dead a few months from now, when her bills went unpaid and the repo guys jimmied the door.

Her laptop was plugged in, though, and the Word file was still open on the desktop—a single page of a novel she had never started, with the words “The End” typed smack in its center. As she sank to the floor, she managed a laugh. “The End.” They’d think it was a suicide note, wouldn’t they?

And there she’d be, where she was now, finally, thankfully. Cheek to the cool oak floor, having died of a worm.

“If you are a writer, stop whatever you are doing, unless you’re actually writing, and read The Novelist. From page one, Barkat dives deep into the writer’s mind as it really is… At times I felt I was reading the book and listening to the radio in my own head, and the words were identical. The Novelist soothed this writers soul, made me laugh, and uplifted my confidence. Hemingway said, ‘Writing is easy, just sit at the typewriter and bleed.’ Barkat covers all the in between moments so creatively. I thoroughly enjoyed The Novelist.”

—William Y., Amazon reviewer

 
Read a Rumors of Water excerpt
Read Making the Perfect Cup of Tea
Read Re-Covering Time

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I will catch up with you next week.

Because it is true. There is excitement and work. Sorrow, deep sorrow. Birth of friendships, or maybe just deepening.

I will have tea with you then, I tell her.

I am overwhelmed.
 

Then I see this at April Harris’s Life and Times. She is writing about tea …

But it isn’t just the drink itself that is important, it is the ritual round it. Not that we have tea ceremonies like in Japan or anything, but the simple act of boiling water, pouring it over tea and serving it, is very centering. You see, whether you are making a cup of tea as a celebration, as commiseration and comfort, or to calm someone, the way you make it is the same. So even if your life is falling to pieces around you, or someone in an impossible situation has come to you for help and you have no idea where to start or what to say, making tea is something you can do.

April is right. I will catch up today.

Because I want to make tea, for the Haviland cup that Ann gave me.
 

I put water in the stainless steal teapot. I boil it. I measure Creme Earl Grey into a ceramic container with its little nylon tea basket. I smell the scent that says, “Celebrate” and, on the other hand, “I am so sorry.”

I run my finger along the fragile line of the tea cup. It tapers to a fine edge. I can feel that it is indeed antique.

Light comes through the cup where it thins.
 

Remembering another friend’s tea journey, which centers on the outdoors, I choose to sit outside to drink.

Now the sky and autumn rides on the surface of Creme Earl Grey. Colors of both hope and sorrow.
 

But tea is something we can do.

So I am doing it today.
 

New photography with modified reprint from my first writing blog.
 

 
Read a tea reflection: Recovering Time

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Mine is cold.

I look out the window, see oak and maple leftovers strewn across dead grass. Two dark brown leaves hang from bent stalks in the rock garden. In summer, these were the orange tropical plants, with flowers that looked like pearly goldfish, mouths open to blue skies.

Where have they gone to now? What seeds, like silken-coated ambassadors, might be ushering them through darkness to find Spring on the other side?

Inside, I turn to the task at hand. Making the perfect cup of tea.

It is said that the Japanese emperors used special water for tea. I can’t remember exactly what kind of water it was. Maybe something about dew gathered from cherry blossoms or water melted from snow.

My water comes from the tap. It will have to do. It’s important to use this water only once. Reboiling reduces the oxygen content, makes the tea less tasty. And besides, I like the idea of drinking air with my favorite teas.

I used to think that all teas were created equal. Not so. Loose tea is far more flavorful. The larger the leaves, the greater the quality. (In general.) Even though I grew up as a Lipton girl, I don’t foresee ever going back. Not since the Creme Earl Grey from Kathleen’s. Not since the French Bagatelle and Christmas teas. Or the Mariage Freres Wedding Imperial, which leans towards the flavor of coffee with its caramel and chocolate undertones.

Here is a list of what to do with beautiful tea…

1. Put hot tap water in the teapot, while waiting for your tea water to boil. Measure out 1 teaspoon of tea leaves and set aside in the steeping basket.

2. Is the tea black? Bring the water to a rolling boil. Pour it over the leaves immediately. Steep for 5 minutes.

3. Keep the teapot cozy. Tea likes to stay warm through the whole process. That’s why you gave it a head start by warming the teapot first. That’s why you’ll want to wrap it up. I use a towel. Or a charming old-time French scenes tea cozy rimmed with emerald velvet and gold, that Sara made for me.

4. Is the tea green or herbal? Catch the water before it reaches a full boil. Pour. Cozy. 3 minutes for green. You’re working with a more tender situation here. 7 minutes for herbal.

Letting the tea steep too long makes it bitter. You won’t do this though.

You’ll set a timer, gaze out the window for five minutes, or seven, or three.

You’ll get the cream from the fridge, think of orange tropical flowers, or Christmas which only comes in the season of dead leaves. And thinking of leaves, you will turn back to your tea, its leaves yielding to water, to the morning.

This is a modified reprint from my first writer’s blog.

Read Re-Covering Time
Read Becoming Emily

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Now sipping my Christmas tea, the eight minutes already a memory, I peruse two different books. One about tea, one about bread. I turn the pages slowly, write my favorite lines onto colored cards.

Tea cuttings, I learn, take around one year—or even as much as fifteen months—to reach a stage where they can be planted in the tea garden. Then they must grow 15-18 inches before they are eligible to be severely pruned, and once again take time to grow into a flat table, a plucking table.

Bread is similar, in regards to time. We can use flour artificially aged with bleach and bromate (bromate being outlawed in European countries, because it is a carcinogen). Or we can use flour set out in the air, where oxygen, the very thing we breathe, will refine qualities, ultimately cultivate taste.

We don’t have time for the line, said an essay in a book I once reviewed.

The line—a single row of words—have we really no time?

If we have no time for the line, we have no time for loose tea. We have no time for the tea bush, gently coaxed to golden bud. We have no time for finely structured bread.

Let me, let me re-cover time …

for the single line, the tea, the bread.

 

This is a modified reprint from my first writer’s blog.

Read Becoming Emily
Read French and Spanish Tea—The Voice of Passions

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On the third of July, I sat on my back porch with a cup of English Breakfast. I was there to write an essay about the Fourth of July. As is often my way, I look to the things around me to inform my writing path at any particular moment. It makes my life simpler to write synergistically (if you do not want to become part of my essays, you should probably leave the room, or the porch, when I begin putting words to paper).

In any case, for that patriotic day, I was searching for something just right. Nothing too controversially free-wheeling, nothing too hard-line nationalistic. Simply something to celebrate without making any big political statements.

This, of course, is the problem with letting your surroundings determine your writing path. I had brought a cup of English Breakfast to the porch. As I sat to collect my thoughts, I could not escape the irony. Why hadn’t I brought mint? Must it be English Breakfast for the Fourth of July?

One thing led to another and before I knew it I was also considering the imported orange tropical flowers in my herb garden, Benjamin Franklin’s technically “immigrant” status, and the diverse mix of people I had photographed at an evening fireworks show the night before. From a don’t-rock-the-boat standpoint, my morning writing got completely out of hand all because of the English Breakfast.

Tea can be like that. I say I drink it as a daily ritual to comfort me. But in the next moment, I say it is filled with anti-oxidants, it reduces your risk of getting cancer. Green tea helps you lose weight. Red tea helps you sleep. Tea from Granada reminds you of how you walked cobblestone streets, and bought three kinds of tea and powdered saffron in the open square. Kombucha will boost your immune system. Japanese bancha will show you listened to a Mr. Scott Calgaro’s preferences and decided to try them on, to good effect (this is the third box you have bought for yourself, organic).

That is important. The organic part. And the Fair Trade part, too. You feel a twinge of guilt wondering about the Granada tea. Who picked the oranges and dried the meaty peels into little curls that smell so fragrant amidst grey-green pearls of dried leaves and petals of lavender? Who, in fact, grew and picked the lavender, too?

I say I drink my tea as a daily ritual to comfort me, and it is true. Also true are the health benefits, the Granada memories, the social connection element, and the fact that I prefer Fair Trade tea but do not always drink it because I can’t (and don’t want to) follow the path of every leaf and petal. How can it all be true? This is a source of recurring argument in my home. I say I did this or that, for that or this reason. I say five things that all seem different, and they are all true.

When I was a little girl, I lived in a difficult family. My stepfather hid the car keys from my mother. He took the knobs off all the lamps and appliances so we couldn’t use “his” electricity. Once, he choked my sister until she turned beet red. My mother threatened him with a knife, and today, I still have a sister with whom I can drink regular old Lipton. I have long since moved on from that brand, but my gentle mother still requires it when she comes to my house for a visit. She takes it with a bit of milk and hesitates when I offer her the evaporated cane juice sugar. How can it be real if it isn’t white like the milk?

A long time ago, my mother gave me the ritual of tea. It was a comfort, like the poetry she read to me each day before the school bus came. She taught me to drink black tea with a little milk and two teaspoons of sugar. Somewhere along the line she stopped using sugar, so I did too. Today I sometimes add honey. Mostly I let the flavor of the tea stand alone, except when I add milk to something like an Earl Grey, which surely benefits from the adding. My mother is diabetic now, maybe because she started using sugar again and eating donuts alongside her tea; so, when she comes she uses just a half a teaspoon of the evaporated cane or, if she has remembered to bring it along, she uses a sugar substitute.

Today I am drinking Kombucha. I am drinking it because I feel the need for comfort, and I didn’t want to eat chocolate without the companionship of tea. I am also drinking it because my throat feels mildly sore. Kombucha is good when you are sick. So is elderberry syrup, but I put a tea bag in my mug and poured steaming water over it instead. This was more artful than taking the elderberry syrup. Besides, I knew I was going to write about tea, or something altogether different.

But here is the end of the matter, or perhaps the beginning. I am drinking Kombucha tea for five different reasons. All true.

A modified reprint from The Art of Drinking Tea at The Curator.

Read Emily Dickinson Poems
Read French and Spanish Tea

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The following is a reprint of Chapter 11 from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing. At the time, my daughters were ages 9 and 11. I was educating them at home, and they also went to a nearby “farm school” for a few mornings several days a week. We were free to travel whenever we wanted, should that be a possibility (one spring, it was; we went to France and Spain). But most of our “travel” was simply done at home. As you will read…

* * *

I am opening a jar of green tea from Granada, Spain. The jar is an old salsa jar, without its label. The tea is silvery and reminds me of those pictures I’ve seen of the mountain mist in China. There are curls of lavender flowers. Bits of orange peel. I am not surprised about the peels. When we went to Granada, we were told that a nearby city, Sevilla, blooms with orange-scented flowers so strong you can almost smell them in your dreams. When the flowers fall, the oranges come. On every tree-lined street, there is citrus for the taking.

This morning, I am making Te Granada, sharing it with Sara. This is the kind of sharing I feel I could do forever.

“We should do a tea pilgrimage,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe we read everything we can find about tea. Maybe we try new teas from around the world. You could keep a journal. We could write poems. We could go to Kathleen’s Tea House, for scones and Crème Earl Grey.

She agrees, and finds a pink journal with green flowers. She makes a declaration page, for those who want to say yes to the journey. She makes lines for signatures. I sign mine, “Mommy.”

I open the computer, go to our local library’s site, and type in tea. A book comes up: Tea With Jane Austen, and I order it.

Over the next month, after dinner with my girls, I share the words of this book. We read of tea in England, of how Jane would have made toast with an iron contraption, and how she held the key to the tea cabinet. Tea was so expensive in Jane’s time that servants would steal it to resell. A servant not inclined to steal might save the used leaves and peddle them. Charlatans made tea from poisonous tree leaves, added coloring and sometimes dung, and put it up for sale. The British became so enamored with tea that they went into national debt over it. The plan for extrication from this dilemma? Sell opium to their tea trader: China.

The girls and I try new teas. We place our orders with daddy-the-world-traveler. He brings home Christmas Tea and Bagatelle, from Betjeman and Barton, located in Paris. I become so enamored with these teas that I trade in my standing order for chocolate and make it tea. The girls steal away with cups of Christmas Tea, regardless of the season. I discover that Betjeman and Barton do not distribute through channels in the U.S., so my new habit will, of necessity, take me to their online French catalog, where every tea sounds like heaven, with roses and sunflowers or orange peels and cherries.

To have a voice, a writer must have passions and a sense of place. These passions and their places infuse the writing with silvery leaves and orange peels, versus, say, ocotillo and pequins. The words of a region, a philosophy, a passion for French or French tea, come with their own sounds and rhythms and fragrances. If we read the Palestinian poet Darwish, for instance, we will find ourselves mouthing, jasmine, doves, olives, veils. Whereas if we read a poet like Marcus Goodyear, we will find ourselves breathing to the staccato of cactus, cattle, tree poker.

Sometimes aspiring writers ask me if they should get a degree in writing, or go to a lot of writer’s conferences. A writing degree and a conference will help us make valuable professional connections. They might inspire (or require) us to write. Which is a good thing. But we don’t need either of these experiences to find and use our voice. Our voice will be better developed if we spend time with our passions. Learn the difference between a tangerine and a tangelo. Consider the variation in their blooms, and the place where their nectar beads.

I pour a tea called Polka into two cups, one for Sara, one for me. It is dotted with sunflower petals. If this tea could smile and speak, it would tell us of its home, first in the mountains of China or India, then somewhere in the sun-kissed countryside of France.
 

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It’s not hard to make a secret garden if you begin with the existing hedges and let them start to reach for the sky and dance in the wind. I only clip the hedges on the sidewalk-side now, as a courtesy to people who might actually want to walk on the sidewalk past my house.

The higher the hedges grow, the happier I become. For more reasons than I expected.

For one thing, the birds have returned. I imagine this place, before houses were raised too close to one another. I imagine the way the trees must have covered the landscape. Fir, maple, beech. The Hudson River in the distance, and the mountains beyond that, where a glacier came through long ago, before the birds first arrived.

Now my hedges, in their new softness of shape, invite cardinals, chickadees, sparrows. The birds rustle the little leaves as they play in and out, deciding where they will go next. The red maple at the top of the hill? Or the hemlocks lining the slim driveway? I delight to watch the birds from my second-floor bedroom window, where I feel a bit like a modern Emily Dickinson.

Emily and I have our differences. She wrote short poems; I write short and long. She wore white dresses. I put on black Lou & Grey casual wear. She was also frail of constitution, which caused a certain level of interruption in her life, as you can imagine. I have raised two children, which is not quite interruption, but it’s not smooth solo sailing either.

The Amherst poet and I also have our similarities, at least as far as “the lore” surrounding her goes. Emily did not like doing laundry. She liked to be alone. She wasn’t much of a traveler beyond her own door. But she seemed to be a passionate and curious being. And she loved her friends deeply. She lived in a setting that was a bit like her own secret garden.

I actually don’t (yet) know Emily’s stance on tea (not even the literary Mark Twain House “Twain Tea”). (Sorry, Emily.)

I do know she liked to bake cookies for the neighborhood children—cookies which she would supposedly lower out her window in a basket. She sometimes penned poems on chocolate wrappers. (I celebrate this by being an endless fan of Chocolove, with its poems in the wrappers, though admittedly I am there less for the poems than for the 55% dark, with almonds and sea salt.)

Once upon a time, I thought I was an extrovert. I even wrote a book that contains declarations about my extroverted tendencies. (Sorry, Me.) Now I understand that though I can be a very outgoing person, my true nature is one that loves solitude—and secret gardens.

My daughters, who I have had a rich life of learning and writing and creating with, are making their way in the world—trying to figure what they will “do with their lives.” I feel like I am on that journey, too, even though I already have things I do, like being a writer and publisher.

So I’ve decided to travel with my daughters. (Like Me). Or to travel alone. Mostly at home. (Like Emily.)

Our first exploration is Morocco. (I can’t even believe I didn’t know that Casablanca is there!) We’ve been learning about the history of the place, the art, the music, the food. Another discovery: apparently the Beat poets hung out in Tangier.

Because I also love my friends deeply, I’ll sometimes travel with them, too. I’m taking tea for the journey. I invite you to come along.
 

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It is fragrant in here,
behind the diamond-shaped
glass, under the white tin
cover, spiraled to finality
(at least for now). Black leaves
nestle curls into curls,
brush against lavender
and pearlescent petals, suspended
until a hand brings water
and vanilla-hungry air.

— L.L. Barkat, from Top 10 Best Tea Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry
 

Enjoy more poetry
Read Becoming Emily

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I’m L.L. Barkat—your Emily D.—and I’m delighted to have you here for tea.

There will be many others in this space, eventually, to also be your Emily D. on any given day.

Together, we want to help you travel. Inwardly and outwardly. At home and away. If you are a writer, we hope to inspire your writing life and practice.

How?

With tea, poetry, life reflections, place explorations—and whatever else we eventually dream up.

So come in, and fill your teacup.
 

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