Tea is a way to infuse your day with peace, calm and clarity

Dinner was winding down and our host was preparing coffee. “None for me,” I said. “No coffee?” asked another guest, incredulity in her voice.

For a long time, I did drink coffee. And now I don’t.

Truth be told, I always preferred the smell of coffee to the taste: coffee, even good coffee, tasted muddy to me. I gave it up temporarily, during a course of antibiotics a few years back that wreaked havoc on my stomach, and temporary became permanent.

Happens that I like tea better, anyway. It tastes cleaner and clearer. I loaded my coffee with sugar and milk but I take my tea plain: for me, it needs no embellishment. Don’t like spiced teas and can’t stand rooibos, but other wise I drink pretty well any tea: I particularly like the smokiness of gunpowder teas and the delicate bergamot perfume of Earl Grey.

Usually, I brew tea from leaves, but I don’t turn my nose up at bags: one of the best pots of tea I’ve had in recent memory was made from two Twinings English Breakfast tea bags.

Cleaning out a storage cupboard, I came upon a stash of camomile tea bags at the bottom of a suitcase, sealed in a plastic bag. It had been there for ages. I made a cup using one and, although the taste was faded, it was still there, lemony and delicate. I thought how good it tasted going down, how warming. How soothing. I remembered countless conversations over pots of tea — the giggly and gossipy ones, the romantic ones, the intense ones.

Although I know nothing of formal tea ceremonies, I enjoy preparing tea as much as I do drinking it: listening for the water to boil, measuring out the tea, warming the pot, waiting as it steeps.

“Just the idea of making tea for myself shifts my consciousness into a sort of dreamtime,” tea aficionado Frank Hadley Murphy observed in an essay called The Spirit of Tea. “Especially if I am alone, I know that I can now hang my mind up on a hook in the mud room and close the door behind me. The ritual has already begun.”

His essay is part of a delightful new anthology, A Tea Reader ( Tuttle Publishing, $ 18.95), by tea lover and writer Katrina Ávila Munichiello, a collection of stories about memories experienced over tea. Making and tasting tea, Murphy writes, he feels as if Thea, the Greek goddess of light, has begun to illuminate his soul, as if there are “moonbeams shining out from inside me. Things are clearer.”

In her essay A Cup of Comfort, Dorothy Ziemann writes about her father. He had lung cancer and, as a nurse, she knew the end was near. Wanting to spend as much time with him as she could, she’d take him to his chemotherapy treatments. She’d knit and he would read or doze. She knew he loved her and that she loved him, but they didn’t say it much.

She was a tea drinker; he preferred coffee, thought “tea was a woman’s drink.” So Ziemann was surprised when, during chemo one day, he asked for tea. She went out and bought tea bags — decaffeinated because caffeine kept him from sleeping — and two mugs and hurried back to make him tea. “He took a sip and sighed with a peaceful look on his face. ‘ Dorothy,’ he said, ‘ I never knew tea was so soothing. I’ve really missed out, haven’t I?’ ”

And over their tea, they talked: he said how proud he was of her and how much he loved his granddaughters, her girls, and she told him how much she loved him and appreciated all he had done for her: she said what she wanted to say.

As something of a tea snob, accustomed to loose leaf tea brewed in a teapot, Ziemann wouldn’t ordinarily drink tea- bag tea — let alone grocery- store Lipton tea bags. “But that tea I shared with my father on that dreary day in a chemotherapy office was the best tea I can remember drinking in my life,” she wrote. “It tasted like ambrosia.”

It was their last afternoon together before he died and, every time she drinks tea now, she smiles and thinks of her father and how they were finally able to share their feelings. “My father was right — tea is soothing.”