Coffee, Tea, or Me?

Late addition: Hey, check out my cute pixel doll on the left! My dear friend KatieK made it for me, and Keri helped me figure out how to get it on my blog (I'm so hopeless at this stuff). Thanks!!

I have re-discovered the joy of a hot cup of tea.

I usually drink coffee, but when I am sick (as I am now) I cannot stand the thought of coffee. So, I go back to tea.

I wasn't always a coffee drinker. I began my love affair with coffee rather late in life. As a child, a cup of weak tea with sugar and milk was like a hug from my mom when I was sick. Coffee was something my Dad drank before he went to work. As I grew up, it felt like a rite of passage, to be invited to have a cup of tea at the table with my Grandmom, Mom and aunts. Eventually, I did away with the milk and just enjoyed a good strong cup of tea with a little bit of sugar.

Coffee was discovered in college as a way to get my eyes open for early morning class when I had pulled an all-nighter finishing a paper. I was an English major, so I always had papers, and I always waited until the last minute to do them. On a crappy old electric typewriter, using erasable paper because I was such a poor typist. But I digress.

Tea was still my morning beverage of choice in my early adult years. Sometime after George and I got married at the tender age of 22 -- at some point we had enough money to eat dinner at a nice restaurant -- I decided that a cup of coffee after dinner was a sophisticated habit I wanted to cultivate. And that coffee tasted soooo good, usually with a dessert that we split because we couldn't afford two.

In the early part of my career, I felt discriminated against because I was a tea drinker, and tea drinkers were treated as second class citizens. In the office, if they made tea bags available, you had to heat water in the pot used for coffee, so you had coffee-flavored tea.

Eventually, I went over to the dark-er side. I became a coffee drinker. No, I became a coffee addict. In recent years, I could drink a pot of coffee by myself on a weekend morning. I probably drank an equivalent amount on days when I was stuck in an 8 or 9 hour meeting (twice a week). Yes, I love the flavor of a good cup of strong coffee. But I realize now that I've been using it as a drug to help overcome the fatigue and mind fog of fibromyalgia.

I tried giving up my legal drug-of-choice, but it's no use. I enjoy it, and I crave it. So I have 1 or 2 cups a day. George and I are so picky, we order our coffee on-line. We like Community Coffee's Cafe Special from Louisiana. Very strong but never bitter.

I never totally stopped drinking tea. George and I have a little ritual when we are spending a quiet evening at home, reading and listening to music or watching a movie. We make tea, not with tea bags but with one of our collection of loose teas and one of our favorite tea pots. Gunpowder green, silver leaf (expensive!), golden tipped assam, or whatever appeals. For a long time when my dad was sick we rarely had a quiet night at home. In the past year we've rediscovered our evening tea ritual and are enjoying it once again.

This afternoon I'm sipping on a nice hot cup of Earl Grey. I'd forgotten how soothing an afternoon cup of tea can be.