4/3

i'm thankful for tea bags. i'm thankful that though i know it probably marks me as a philistine and loose leaf tea supposedly tastes better, i tend to prefer tea bags to loose leaf tea and a strainer, both for the sake of convenience and because i like the experience of tea bags. i'm thankful to open the box containing my decaf green tea or cinnamon herbal tea and to see the orderly little file cabinet row of envelopes waiting there, each one slightly plump with its contents, like a padded mailer. i'm thankful to pull out one, the little bit of adhesive sealing the flap to the body giving way and opening to reveal the contents. i'm thankful to pull the tea bag out of the envelope by the string, the little flag or tag at the end like the tail of a kite and to lift it into the empty mug. i'm thankful while pouring the hot water into the mug to aim for the heart of the bag, so i'm pouring into it, in the hope of extracting the most flavor. i'm thankful for the spent wrapper that i've left on the counter while doing this, an echo of a stray cigarette paper, for how suddenly light it is when i lift it to throw it away. i'm thankful to have learned, when looking up whether i should put a space in "tea bag" to have learned about tea bag folding, which is the kind of fastidious craft i have neither the dexterity nor the patience to do, but i'm thankful that some people find a way to take this bit of quotidian trash and, through the application of time and attention, make a small nice thing from it. i'm thankful to try to make small nice things in my own way.