If This Is Coffee, Please Give Me Tea
a quote by Abraham Lincoln
Today I pondered economics as I drank the remaining loose-leafed Irish Breakfast Tea from my favourite tea shop, World of Tea. I adore it. It is smoky and at 4 minutes of steeping becomes a strong and sustaining elixir. But it costs $9 per 50 grams or 36 cents a cup. A typical tea bag (if there is such a thing) is 20 cents or less. With the need to be frugal, does this mean I stop buying it?
I don’t drink tea every day these days. I drink water, but tea has always inspired creativity for me. Now my creativity is inspired by a driving need to find my way in this time, and to make money. Every dime counts, doesn’t it? Even if dimes aren’t very common anymore.
As my husband and I walked to our local grocery store to take advantage of deals on chicken, I talked to him about this conundrum. We discussed our coffee situation. When he worked full time, we drank it daily. We have a grinder and a programmable coffee maker. The price for coffee went up drastically in 2023. The cheapest we could buy was $14 / a pound. It took us about three weeks to drink it. We still have a few pounds in the cupboard.
Since his lay-off, we stopped drinking coffee daily. We have it at home on occasion and sometimes, for a treat, at Ten Toes or Art House Café. We spend from $5-7 a cup at these establishments, but we get more than just coffee. We get a chance to get out of the apartment and we find we talk for a long time. He suggested that if we had no coffee available to us at home, when we wanted some, we would always go out for it to a café, which would become expensive. So it’s best to have some coffee in the cupboard and not to stint on your favourite tea. Perhaps I will buy more Irish Breakfast from World of Tea, but I’ll likely wait until I am finished drinking some of the other lovely teas I have, especially the Lapsang Souchong, which tastes of campfires and dreams.
Thank you to all who have subscribed, either for a free or paid subscription. I appreciate your support. Every annual paid subscription covers another week of groceries. I have a much more specific understanding of money than I had before this great change happened. I have to come up with a name for it, the change: financial setback, Charles’ lay off. I don’t like these. Do you have any suggestions? Something whimsical and positive to name what happened: Charles was laid off in November on a Thursday and we have had to figure out how to live without that source of income and find our way into new territory with less money, but more time. Perhaps I’ll call it Thursday. How confusing. Ever since Thursday, we’ve been cancelling subscriptions. Ever since Thursday, we’ve been reading flyers to find cheap cuts of meat. Ever since Thursday, we’ve been shopping for spices. Ever since Thursday, we’ve been finding joy in our daily rambles and quests. Thursday is going to be a very long and enriching day.
Paradoxically, this time we have feels like a luxury. It’s an opportunity to ask how we want our lives to be. Do we want to commute to an office, sit in cubicles every day from nine to five, do work that someone has assigned? To be honest, I’m not sure that either one of us would be hired for such, at our age. When I apply to these jobs via LinkedIn or Indeed, they often ask me my age. Or they expect me to be fully cognizant with “SEO,” which turns out to mean, “search engine optimization.” Reader, I am not. I don’t want to be. I don’t care.
What I want is enough money to cover food, shelter, basic internet and cell phone, medical expenses, laundry, transportation, with a little extra for the occasional cup of smoky tea. So we are learning to simplify. As Charles has said, we have to avoid the feeling of deprivation.
I want a life where we both get to do fulfilling work that helps people. As part of that life, I am working on building an editing and mentoring service, and I’ve already secured a client and received numerous glowing testimonials, for which I am very grateful. I am offering workshops. I am submitting creative work to paying publications and also collecting forthcoming books to review. I am writing a lot of new work. It surprises me that during this difficult time, I have a burning desire to write. I thought I would be too on edge, too anxious, and I am all of those things, but I am also desperate to understand what is going on through the one coping mechanism that has sustained me all my life: my writing.
Do you find that your creative work is vital during times of trouble? I’d love to know your own experiences and musings.