Lifting Your Own Teabag

II. Don’t Ever Do That Again

OBSERVER: ALECIA DANTICO ON MAY 4, 2020, IN CHICAGO, IL

OBJECT: USED TEABAGS AND TINFOIL

LEVEL OF AFFECTION: GARBAGE TURNED TREASURE

Alecia has been sick the past six weeks with an “unknown respiratory virus,” which led to a familiar set of symptoms: high fevers, lost sense of taste and smell, shortness of breath, and an inability to sustain any physical activity—no yoga, no walks. (She was denied a Covid-19 test in late March—Illinois did not have enough and she did not meet the testing criteria.) The illness, whatever it is, also caused hallucinations that, she told me, heightened her sense of creativity. “I literally have a hundred small pieces of paper with things written on them,” she said, “and, like, words are coming.”

I get tea in the morning before I go to work. I usually sit in a coffee house by my office. I go in early and I take really the first 30 minutes of the day for myself and just kind of ease into it.

The first week of being home, the Starbucks on the corner was open. I could walk there. And then Starbucks closed, and then I got sick. But one of my luxuries is having Starbucks pour the hot water over the teabag, which I’m certainly capable of doing myself.

Now I work from home. Everything’s at home. The Starbucks is closed. So it’s like, what’s happening? So obviously I’m making my own tea at home. But the interesting thing is I’m saving all of the teabags.

I just made a cup of tea this morning, and then I’ll make a second cup of tea, probably at about 11:00, and I will keep the bags on the counter. And I will make then a third cup of tea and a fourth cup of tea from the used teabags. And if I don’t get to them today, I’ll leave them on the counter and I’ll wake up tomorrow and be like, Oh, there’s my teabags.

And it’s this really odd sense of comfort for something that, in the past, I would have considered garbage. I either would have thrown it away, or I would have walked it out to the compost bin, which I never really figured out how to compost very well.

I mean, tea steeps. It’s not like coffee: drink it and it’s gone. That’s the whole process of the tea. And while this was something I allowed myself the luxury of doing on the weekends, it’s flipped now and I’m thinking, Why didn’t I just bring an electric kettle with me to work and make my tea? I realized I don’t need to go to Starbucks to pour hot water over a teabag.

And the same kind of thing is happening with tinfoil. I have a stash of used tinfoil on the counter. I have OCD. I’m a neat freak. I don’t have that much on my counter, but there’s used tea bags and there’s used tinfoil. I’m thinking, What is going on here? Like you can still get tinfoil, you can still get teabags. And I’m like, Oh my God, this is what my grandmother used to do.

She was born in 1913. So she saw World War I. She had kids in the middle of World War II. She went through the Depression and she was very, very frugal. She worked very hard. She supported the family, and I never understood why she would save the scraps of dough when she would make cookies. She would roll them up and wrap them in Saran Wrap and put them back in the freezer and save the scraps of dough for the next time. And I’m like, “Grandma, I’ll buy you more flour. I’ll buy you more eggs.”

In a way, I never really understood until going through this and watching myself save teabags and save tinfoil. It’s frugality, but it’s a frugality driven from a point of scarcity, not from a point of “I can’t afford another teabag.” It’s like, “What if there are no more?” And that’s kind of where I am.

I’m just thinking how attached I’ve become. I accidentally threw some tinfoil away and I’m like, “Don’t do that ever again.” And now they’re a part of my everyday life and I’m like, “What am I going to do when we go back?” Buy a kettle and leave used teabags on my desk at work, which may raise eyebrows, but now I kind of get why my grandmother couldn’t do it any other way. She’s like, “No, it’s just what I do now.”

The tea is bringing me a pleasure that it didn’t always bring me before. Now it’s infused with joy. Given that they are so simple, their power to impact my life is stunning. And that causes me to think about all the crap in my life that doesn’t impact my life. With the objects and things I’ve accumulated over the years, they ostensibly have more meaning and more value than a teabag or tinfoil, but maybe these have been the important things all along. Like, I don’t need most of my crap. But I do need my tea. If it came down to what I would fight for, I’d fight for my tea. And that’s new.

So I’m affectionate toward and grateful for these objects. I’m trying to process what they mean to me emotionally and how I will carry those emotions forward into this next phase. I don’t want to lose this. I used to think of both as garbage. The fact that I now consider them treasure, I mean, that’s a step up on the evolutionary scale.

Yoga is important—it helps me feel better, it helps my body—but the entire point of that practice is actually contained in the simplicity of a single teabag. That’s it. The whole industry, one teabag. I’m like, Huh, OK. Don’t need the pants. Don’t need the mat. And I don’t need to be in any spot other than in my kitchen. The lesson is so simple. I guess it never really clicked until now. Like this is what I should be doing, making a cup of tea when I get stressed. Oh, OK. Cool. And then preserving that for later and having another cup of tea in the afternoon. That’s all it takes?

Thinking back on the rituals that I had before all of this. What was I attached to? Was I attached to the brand of the tea, of the coffee house where I got the tea? It’s like, no, I just want the tea to taste good.

I’m getting stuck on the Starbucks. I’m trying not to judge myself, but it’s just like, What was that? What were you doing? I get the signal and start of the day and all that great stuff, but like, Why didn’t you do that at home?

Maybe I just didn’t know. Maybe I just told myself I was too busy to take the three extra minutes in my home to brew a cup of tea before I left. You know? So it’s just a recalibration. And there will always be a time and a place for some Starbucks. But I’m like, if what is truly meaningful to me is the ritual, then it’s all the more meaningful when I’m the one performing the ritual for myself, versus outsourcing the ritual.