Hot Tea, Cool Heart

As she walked through the kitchen she took a look at the pile of breakfast dishes in the sink, sighed, doubled back to the circular red mat, rolled up the sleeves on her thumbed yoga jacket and threw on the tap. Do them now or deal with them at the crack of ass in the morning. Why she didn't do them this morning confounds her since she found the time to read 300 pages of her book while searching for knee high brown boots online and cruising recipe blogs for cinnamon twist churro-like donuts. Those are priorities. Dishes, pffft. Unexciting. Until 8 pm rolls by and Kerri realizes how much of the day she's pissed away. Anxiety creeps in like a parachute deflating on top of her, swallowing her whole. Gotta do more, gotta be more. That's when she clocks the teapot, barely warm, filled to the brim with the after dinner herbal digestive tea she boiled off an hour earlier. At least she can drink lukewarm tea. Tepid coffee, not so much. Either ice cold or steaming hot with a thick crema on top, that's how she likes her coffee. She spent good money on this tea, too. Supposed to help with rumbly tummy and settle the nerves after a stressful day. Plus it smelled like liquorice. She loves liquorice tea. Although the box he left behind makes her want to rip the door off the pantry every time she sees it. She can't bear to throw it out because she knows come February when it's minus stupid outside she'll be thankful for almond biscotti dunked into a ginormous mug of steaming hot liquorice tea. By then he'll be a distant memory, relegated to the "what the hell was I thinking" files of men she'd endowed with qualities they just don't have. At least he liked good tea. Everything else...wow. A gong show. Now she has a cupboard full of tea, lots of tea. Loose, bagged, Chinese, Japanese, handcrafted, generic, cheap and cheerful, and this box of fancy shmancy holistic healing tea. Kerri plunges her hands into the suds and pulls out her favourite mug, the one she got in the secret santa swap from work. Bright yellow with a mouse on the side, tacky but huge, deep yet narrow enough that tea stays hot longer. Kerri's come to realize that some of the best things show up in unexpected packages. The attractive ones, the pretty, shiny, sexy ones are useless if they won't keep her tea hot.

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