Mrs. Teabody Greets the Day

An acquaintance of long-standing, FactFree Frankenfurter visited my little tea emporium last week. He's a droll character and as smug and self-satisfied a man as one would ever hope to encounter.  FactFree Frankenfurter is that rarest of birds in this 21st century: the Know-It-ALL (ba-dump-bump). Now, never you mind that FactFree does not read a newspaper, has his television set tuned to one channel only and leaves it on 24/7 so it never cools down. He is a man long on opinions but a man short on facts. This is how our conversation went: "Why are you closing the store for a couple days this week?" FactFree asked. "Oh, I'm going to the New York gift show to look for new merchandise. You know I go twice a year." "You're going BACK up to THAT city? How can you stand to be around all them foreigners?" he asked. "Oh,  you might say that's part of the reason I do go.  ' Them foreigners ' as you call them are artists an...

I am wide awake looking at the moon and stars in the June sky through a window while I am lying in a comfortable bed inside a rental house in Penzance, Cornwall, England. I can count on one hand the times in my life I have been able to see a starry starry sky as sleep finds me. It's a doozy. I want to tell you about our first day here--Saturday-- before I lose the feeling.  Saturday morning started in tension: My three companions pictured above at Saint Michael's Mound had to make the 7:00 A.M. train from London  Paddington-- all four of us with all our luggage -- and we also had to meet up with two other friends inside huge Paddington Station because I had their tickets. All that went off without a hitch and the six of us managed to get on the train  in our assigned seats, our many pieces of luggage stowed on the main rack at the end of the car.  So far so good.  Great Western Rail have a scheme on weekends where you can upgrade to first c...

For some it is the ultimate comfort food. Familiar. Dependable. Uncomplicated. It is a staple found in most kitchen pantries. It is the sometimes rejected but always offered "side" in a restaurant meal. Think about your favorite meals from childhood and it played a role; think about a vegetable that is served daily in school cafeterias, at almost every fund-raising or celebratory banquet you have ever attended and even at most wedding receptions.  Think about the ultimate American fast food meal of which it is the noteworthy companion to the burger.  Yes, Gentle Reader, we are talking about the potato. Mr. Webster describes the potato as "a starchy plant tuber that is one of the most important food crops, cooked and eaten as a vegetable." For me as a child, it was almost the only vegetable I would eat. Beat the hell out of Brussels sprouts I can assure you . . . You can do almost anything cooking-wise to a white potato and it will still be delicious.  At...

It's past mid-April but here I sit on this "spring" morning in my flannel pajamas and wooly socks sipping on a hot cuppa Yorkshire Gold as if it's the dead of winter.  Any chance of sitting inside the secret garden for breakfast went straight out the window when I read 31 on the thermostat. Today's afternoon plan was to prune and treat roses because the forsythia is in full flower  but what does April have in mind?  Starting out at a balmy 31 degrees at 5:00 A.M., who's to say? April is a moody and unpredictable friend. One day she is sunny and generous, and the very next day she can  decide to drop an errant snowstorm into the path of one's best-laid plans as she did just a few days ago. Robert Frost knew all about April as he writes in Two Tramps in Mud Time : You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over t...

March marches on, doesn't it? Last week at this time Mother Nature was showing us here in Pennsylvania much of what she knows about creating havoc with wind. Needless to say, we were impressed. Perhaps distressed. Definitely stressed. I like calm. I like electricity. I was glad when the storm was over, but the storm and subsequent power outage reminded me of the forces of Nature of our planet and our place on it.  Of course many things about the world are outside our control; that being said, we still make deliberate choices about our behavior and our interaction with the world and the other humans whose paths we cross. Some of these choices are not wise. Face it: we often CREATE problems for ourselves. We overindulge in food; we push our bodies too hard or not hard enough; we abuse our organs with excesses of all kinds and we abuse our bones with our awkwardness,  our lack of care or  by pushing  our physical boundaries. And we do every bit as much da...

"Where would we be without our tea?"  Hello, March!  Do you hold your breath every morning wondering what surprises the weather will bring? After the most erratic February in memory, you might indeed  have just cause. But here we are at the front door of March and we are going to be hopeful. Today we are all about tea and posies--blooms if you will. The past two days have been busy at Tickle Your Fancy as parcel after parcel arrived-- all delivered by the charming  and popular UPS gentleman who was persuaded to have a freshly-baked scone yesterday. At least once a month we try to add to the already extensive menu of teas available at  TYF. Just five short years ago, we first heard the name Pu-erh. This fermented tea is pronounced Pooh-air , and one of its descriptors is "warm hay in a barn." Oh, my! How perfectly odd we thought at the time. However, we now carry at least three versions of Pu-erh in loose form. Mrs. Teabody rather enjoys this savory...

I vividly recall the first time I stood on the shoreline in Margate, New Jersey (39th parallel North-- same as McConnellsburg, PA) and contemplated the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.  I'd studied geography in school, watched my teachers pull maps of the world down in front of the blackboard, memorized a thing or fifty about the world. There wasn't a school library in my past that didn't feature a globe and it set my brain cells on fire to spin it and think how we all lived on an oblate spheroid floating in space and that we spun, too. Dizzying concept for a child. One of the thoughts I contemplated as I stood there was that if I could walk in a straight line across the Atlantic Ocean, I'd come to Europe. Hopefully, I'd end up in some charming town in England near the Beatles. Near Paul.  This morning's research of the 39th parallel North tells me we share our latitude with the Island of Ibiza (Spain), Island of Sardinia (Italy) then Greece, Turkey, Iran, U...