The lurgy is still here. Tests don’t agree, but we’re pretty sure it’s COVID. It sure feels like the last time we got COVID. It is not particularly joyful.
We’ve been going back through the Advent teas today, and noticing that this year the calendar went weirdly e. e. cummings on us. Nothing – bar nothing – is capitalized. It’s bizarre. Not even the country names, as in English Breakfast. No, David in his infinite wisdom, calls it ‘english breakfast.’ It looks all wrong.
We can confirm that Lavender Earl Grey is as lovely as we suspected. We managed to drink that when briefly free of the fever, and it was nice. Don’t add milk to it. You’ll spoil it.
By the afternoon everything was so awful we were drinking camomile. And you can tell it was terrible, because we liked it. It didn’t taste vilely of hay. We blame mucked up taste buds. On the plus side, it bought us approximately three hours sleep…until the Dachshund Chorus decided at four o’clock that it was actually five and refused to stop barking.
Whereat, we came down and magnificently shunned dachshunds (you have to remember a cat trained us), and had today’s tea. It’s a green tea called Hojicha (hojicha on the calendar…) It’s a really lovely floral green tea, and in all the time we sat there drinking it – this was a very long time because our head ached and we felt miserable and were plotting the slow demise of dogs that wouldn’t let us sleep even though we weren’t really sleepy any more – it never went bitter. That’s a trick with green tea.
Here’s where we should segue into a poem by e. e. cummings.
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
e. e. comings
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church’s protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
…. the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
See? Even Mr. No Capitals capitalizes his proper nouns. The calender is on drugs. Or maybe just cold medication…
Chorister at Home 