Afternoon Tea

This weekend when I went to visit my mother and father with my son, my modest collection of teacups almost doubled. My parents' friends Barb and Fred are scaling down. As they enjoy retirement they are going through their possessions and passing along some of them for several reasons, not the least of which is not wanting their children to have to go through two lifetimes' worth of stuff-collection after their parents pass away.

My mother mentioned to Barb that I might make a good caretaker of most of her aunt's teacup collection. Barb kept one cup and saucer for sentimental reasons and passed the rest on to me free of charge. They join the nearly dozen cups and saucers I kept of my grandmother's, along with a full tea service that was either my great-grandmother's or my great-great-grandmother's. (Mom, which is it?)

I do not collect teacups for the sake of collecting, nor have I ever bought a teacup at an antique store, or anywhere else for that matter (though I would if the right one jumped out at me). I use them. For tea. In fact, in my pre-teen days I used to brew a pot of tea on a Saturday morning and make myself a little tray of toast with various jams (which I guess was my substitute for scones and cucumber sandwiches) and drink the entire pot by myself using an antique teacup from my mother's collection (I think she must have about 50 of them at this point). I was very particular about which cup to use with which kind of tea. I had a specific cup for English Breakfast, raspberry, blackberry, Earl Grey, chamomile, and many other teas.

But I'm not ODC. Really.

Those cups are still part of Mom's collection, and I'm not so particular these days. But I ask you, which of these cups would you rather drink tea from?

Tea simply tastes better when it is in a fine china cup (no offense to the nice folks who worked at the now long-defunct Cornerstone Cafe). The teacup above is the one that I don't use, but only out of fear that I will destroy it. There is a hairline crack in it and it is my very favorite of my grandmother's collection. It is very thin porcelain and was made in Germany in 1912 (that's two years prior to the start of World War I) and I'm sure it would be nearly impossible to replace.

Most of the teacups I have are English. Most are fine china, but some are certainly not so fine. All of them make tea taste a little better and add a little bit of class to life. And we could all use a little bit of that.

I mean, look at that woman with her elbows on the table. Shameful.