Spring Tea

I am on my hands and knees in the middle of the yard, gathering weeds on an early May evening– not pulling them, like a normal person would, but actually gathering them. I am going to make a spring refresher tea.  

I normally hate work like this.  This is the kind of  work that I consider to be too tedious and detail oriented.  

That romantic picture of a farmer’s wife sitting on the porch in her house dress, snapping and tailing beans or shelling bowl after bowl of peas?  Nope.  Not for me.  A lot of people know that “just ‘get ‘er done’ as fast as possible and get on to the next thing” is my MO.  

But something happens tonight.  Everything in my mind just goes quiet.  

I start to notice the satisfying ‘snip, snip” sound and feeling as I pluck each little violet off its stem.  I have to be careful to handle each one just right so as not to pull the whole stem, ruin the flower, or collect a cluster of grass with the blossom.  

I observe the vivid purple of the violet’s bloom, the accents of white and yellows, and the little detailed dots in each petal. 

I wonder at the perfection of each clover leaf and the delicate light green accents hand brushed  onto each one.   I examine more closely the tiny blooms of the creeping Charlie–Suburban America’s second most hated lawn dweller, bested only by the dandelion.

The electric yellow of that dandelion against the backdrop of the emerald grass and the purple of the violets defies the plants’ common ID as “weeds.”  

I lose myself in reverie of the glory of something so commonplace.  

I forget about how tedious it is, and how meaningless it seems, to be collecting petals from backyard weeds for a tea that probably won’t even taste that great.  This tea holds the promise of being “anti-inflammatory,”  whatever that actually means.  We have no randomized, double-blind trials to prove its medicinal merits.  

But still I pick.  Somehow, I feel its effects before I even dry or brew or drink the tea. 

Two Baltimore orioles call their sweet song in a back-and-forth duet.  An itty bitty wren chatters its unproportionally loud call, while the red-winged blackbirds say “tweeeeeee” across the field.  

Then the sun begins to get ready for bed, and most of the birds quiet down for the night except the robins, who chant their goodnight song to close out the day.  Once in a while, I hear their territorial cheeking sounds.  

These sounds at once transport my heart back to childhood evenings, when we stayed out until dark and played kickball and Ghost in the Graveyard, and our parents bellowed out of the front door for us to come in for a bath and get into bed.  We relished those warm-cool spring evenings after such a long winter.  

The ground is beginning to become cooler, and it brings me back to the present.  I glance across the lawn and notice that the creeping Charlie appears to be glowing against the rich green grass.  The sunset is at the perfect angle, giving the little purple weed a luminescence  of its own.  I try, but I cannot fully capture this feeling with my camera, so I’ll just have to remember it. 

I’m planning to make this tea into a Mother’s Day gift.  Maybe our moms will enjoy a tea that is claimed to have an anti-inflammatory effect to ease their aches and pains in a body that spent a lifetime serving a family.  

I make a mental note to do some research on the scientific claims of the exact chemicals in this tea.  Are these fact based claims?  

But, as I take advantage of the last warmth of this spring evening, I begin to realize that it is not a box of tea off of the store shelf that does so much for well being.  It is this slow exercise of getting in the grass, being part of the landscape, putting the sun to bed, and recalling sweet memories that is the actual medicine. 

The tea that I make for our moms probably won’t do as much as a prescription med from the doctor.  But I have hand picked and dried these leaves and petals from my own yard with my own hands while I thought about how much I love our moms.  And then I will put them in a pretty jar and decorate the jar and tell our moms how much we love them.  

And then the mom will put the pretty jar on her counter, and maybe she won’t even take the time to brew the tea because, let’s be honest, it isn’t really all that that tasty.  

But she will see the jar and think of how much we love her. 

And, if she does brew the tea, maybe the warm, light flavor will feel like a hug, and she will know she is loved, and maybe some of her aches and pains won’t seem as bad.  ♥️