Remembering a tea-cup

How to spend a rainy, miserably cold and windy Octobrrrrrr day.

Poor Lily, she just can't face it

After caring for five gorgeous cats today, I headed back home to finish a little house-cleaning. I wanted to walk Kane but the weather was not fit for man or beast. 

Audrey waited for her treat in her tea-cup.

(when she's not making faces she's quite stunning, isn't she?)

She doesn't drink tea but likes her freeze-dried chicken bits in a fancy cup.

She helped me clean the dining-room today.

She's no slouch, ya know.

This is the cup the kitties share but Audrey has requested her own.

"It must have a dragon on it."

  "Don't you mean a little devil, Audrey?"

So now I'm on the hunt.

Actually, I have been on the hunt for a black dragon on a red tea-cup for years now. 

When I was a child and spent part of my summer holidays at my grandmothers' farm, it was customary for each of the cousins to pick out their favorite tea-cup from the big wall cupboard in granny's summer kitchen. The cupboard stood tall, from floor to ceiling, and the top half held all of her tea-cups and glass-ware. It was wood, painted green inside and the doors creaked a little when they opened. Even at a young age I loved that cupboard. It may have had something to do with the cookies that waited for our greedy little hands that sat on the bottom shelf but I think now that it was the tea-cups and all their fine colours that attracted me the most.  I picked a red tea-cup with a gold rim and a black dragon on the side. The saucer was red with a similar gold rim.  I think over the years I must have drank hundreds of cups of tea in that tea-cup.

As the cousins and I grew older we were also served coffee in those tea-cups. My grandmother was half Irish and half Scots so her drink of choice was always tea. She was a hard-working woman but whenever I think of her, she is sitting in her kitchen with her tabby-cat, Maggie, in her apron, and a cup of tea nearby. She took her time to show us how to pour our tea and coffee and enhance the flavor with milk and sugar. 

We would toast bread on her wood-stove and spread her home-made jams on top.

These are great memories.

Sadly, my grandmother's old clapboard house burned to the ground in the '70's while she was staying with my aunt. Little was saved. Somehow, I ended up with an old granite cup that I treasure now.

So, when I am junkin' I always look for a similar tea-cup to the one that stays etched in my memory.

Now I guess I'll look for one with a little devil on it, too. ;-)

Remember...Drink tea...just for the health of it.

hugs, Deb