Tea for Tue: Tea With Whimsy: Flashes of Insight

Another excerpt from Tea With Whimsy.  This post was from October 20, 2013 and I see that I posted it at 3:38 am.  I guess, I just wasn't sleeping much in those days.  Thankfully, I don't seem to have that issue anymore.  This post was titled...

Flashes of Insight

Yes, it's after 2 am.  This is another of those nights I guess.  At least it's been awhile since I had to write myself to sleep.  I've been sitting here wondering where this story is going.  I'm usually really punchy when I'm writing it, and it comes sometimes like a dream.  That's how I've been writing it down anyway. 

Reading it back, I know it's not that well written...I've done better, but there's just something about having this experience.  I guess you could say it's good medicine.  I suppose I'll keep going and be grateful for it.

So to get back to the story.  I seem to remember we were in the garden looking at the moon...


Her brightness lights the yard and I can feel my cells absorbing the reflected rays, just as the plants all around us are drinking in that marvelous light.  There is a sense of a collective sigh of contentment and it feels like my heart is shining as brightly as that moon.

And then a shudder runs through me, and I feel the air suddenly charged as the world around us lights up with a blinding flash and the explosion of Thunder rips through the air.  The smell of rain comes to us as the wind picks up, and we run for it bursting in through the kitchen door seconds before the heavens open up to drench the land in a mud spattering  downpour.

"My lantern's gone out", I observe aloud.  I set the lantern on the table.  I can't stop shivering and I feel cold all the way into my bones. 

"Your hair!" exclaims Whimsy.

"What about it?" I touch it and hear the crackle of static electricity.

"It's practically standing on end!"  Whimsy declares with a touch of awe in her voice.

My attention is drawn to the window just then and I peer into the blackness which has settled in between flashes.  "Oh look at it pouring!  I'll be drenched if I try to go home now.  You said the storm was hours away"  I chided her.

"That was HOURS ago!" she laughs, and I realize she's right.  That happens every time we get together...it's impossible to keep track as the hours fly by.

"Come over here by the fire!  You haven't stopped shivering since we got back inside."  We stand around the kitchen stove rotating to warm first one side then the other.

After a while I finally stop shivering and I look at the cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall.  "Good Heavens Whimsy!  It's almost 3 am.  I'll bet my cats are in a tizzy with all this thunder!"

"What about your husband?  Does he know you came here?"

"No.  But he's out of town until tomorrow."

"Well then, I guess you'll stay here tonight.  You can go home in the morning, after the storm lets up."

"If the storm lets up by then", I reply.

"Come on", says Whimsy.  "I'll get the cot and set it up here next to the stove and you will be warm as toast.  Then you can go home after breakfast."

In less than 20 minutes I'm snuggled down on the cot, wrapped in wool blankets.  The fire pops a little.  I listen to the creaks and noises of Whimsy's house.  The clock ticks rhythmically and sounds its cuckoos at 3.  The storm continues outside as I relax and the dreams begin before I'm fully asleep.

Thanks for reading.  Join me next Tuesday for a little retro Tea With Whimsy.

Tea For Tue: Tea With Whimsy Continued

To continue from last week.  This was originally posted on Tea With Whimsy on October 10, 2013.  The post was called More Thunder, Toast and Tea

So now, where was I?  Oh yes.  I am lighting the lamps in Whimsy's front room.

Whimsy lights this room with 3 oil lamps.  In fact she doesn't have electricity in her home at all.  Why should she?  She lives simply.  She considers electricity a distraction.  She does her dishes by hand with heated water from the kettle, She has a wood cook stove.  She has a fire place in the front room, and she uses the oil lamps throughout the house.  It's just 3 rooms.  Like I said simple.

I raise the glass chimney on the first lamp and light the wick, and one corner of the room glows into existence.  I see books lining the wall, some have worn spines.  There are a few paper backs, but mostly they are old and bound in cloth and leather.  There is an arm chair here with a foot stool and a small oak table with an almanac on it and a pencil.  There is also a basket nearby with a pair of wooden knitting needles and some soft wool yarn in a light color.  It's hard to tell in this light--maybe light gray?  The wick in the lamp is smoking a little, so I adjust the wick before moving to the next lamp.

With each lamp lit, more of the room comes to life.  And as I am lighting the third lamp Whimsy comes in wheeling her cart before her.  It's one of those old tea carts, and it's filled with what promises to be a small feast.  There is a low round table in front of the fire, and we fill it with the contents of the cart before wheeling it back into the kitchen.  Then we seat ourselves as comfortable as aching joints will allow on a chilly night and warm ourselves by food and fire.  We wrap ourselves in shawls and sit on large soft cushions and talk and laugh and hold bread on toasting forks over the fire and drink tea, and maybe a little port.

A short time later, I'm laughing so hard my sides ache and my throat hurts, and the tears are literally streaming from my eyes while Whimsy tells a particularly earthy story passed down to her from a favorite Aunt.  Dark humor.  Sometimes it's good to laugh at dark things.

Another flash of light outside and still Thunder seems very distant.

Eventually the conversation winds it's way back to where it began earlier in the evening as I declare how very good it is to laugh with a dear friend.  "I really needed that".

Whimsy nods in agreement.  "Yes.  How are you holding up with all this extra activity you've taken on?"  She is referring to the fact that I am simultaneously working 3 jobs at once.

I pour myself a little more tea, still miraculously warm under its cozy.  I take a moment to answer, stopping to breath in the bouquet of the tea, an amazing blend of herbs and flowers, and to sip it appreciatively.  Contemplating my teacup in this moment I can not think of a single thing wrong with my life...and yet I'm not sleeping. 

She gets it, of course.  At least the gist of it, without me having to say a word.

"Not sleeping, eh?"

I shake my head..."Well -- some.  A little.  About 4 hours.  There is just so much to do.  I'm loving doing it all, but I'm bone weary." 

"And I have to pee!"  I announce emphatically, changing the subject.  "All this delicious tea."

We get up and go into the kitchen, grabbing lanterns on the way out the door.  It's very late, but not as bright as it was when I first arrived.  The Moon is now being partly obscured by fast moving Clouds, flying past her face and veiling her from sight for long moments.  A gust of wind, sends my long hair whipping over my face, and we quicken our steps to the small building used as a work room and laundry.  She also has a composting toilet out here.

"Ah! There's nothing like an empty bladder" declares Whimsy after taking her turn.

Then we step back outside into a fully lit landscape and are both stopped in our tracks by a breathtaking view of the nearly full moon surrounded by clouds,  and for the moment not obscured.  Her brightness lights the yard and I can feel my cells absorbing the reflected rays, just as the plants all around us are drinking in that marvelous light.  There is a sense of a collective sigh of contentment and it feels like my heart is shining as brightly as that moon.



And since I just caught myself asleep at my computer once more, I guess it's time to shut this thing off and go meet up with my pillow.   May your dreams be sweet.


And that was another installment of Tea With Whimsy revisited from 2013.  These early versions of the story were the foundation of a much more detailed work which evolved over time.

Thanks for reading.

Tea for Tue another Tea With Whimsy Story

Back in the Autumn of 2013, I began writing blog posts when I couldn't sleep.  Sometimes the posts would be short like this one, and sometimes they would be longer.  Over time, the individual posts became a story, which were the very primitive rough beginnings of a story called Tea With Whimsy, which eventually, I started to polish up as a full length story.  I am reposting them here, every Tuesday, in their original form.  Here is another installment.

I remember I wrote it during a season when we had very unusual thunder storms.  One in particular just seemed to keep rolling through like a slow moving train, and lasted the whole night long.  I kept referring to these posts as a Bed Time Story I Tell Myself, because I would get tired while I was writing and then I could sleep.

This post was written on October 9, 2013 and was titled, Wait A Minute...Am I Still In This Story?

I guess I'm still in this Bed Time Story...I'm still in Whimsy's kitchen...

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a bright flash of light through the window which lights up the garden.  Long moments later comes the low rumble of very distant Thunder.

"Oh--you know, I should get going" I say to Whimsy.

"I thought you were going to have some toast".  She begins slicing bread with a long knife.  "Would you get out the butter?" She gestures at a cupboard in the corner, she calls the cold cupboard.

"It's going to storm" I say reaching for the butter.

"That's hours away."  She says and she sets to work loading up a cart with cups and plates and slices of bread.  I help in the gathering together of tea and honey and toasting forks.  I am lost for a moment in the music of tinkling cups and saucers and silver as we bustle around her warm, fragrant kitchen, with it's smell of fresh herbs and bread and overtones of spicy apple pie, (which turns out instead to be pineapple upside down cake...the pineapple being a gift from a friend who just got back from the islands).

"I haven't lit the lamps yet in the other room.  will you do it.  The fire is already going so you should be able to see well enough" and she tosses me a box of matches.

On the way to light the lamps, another lightening flash can be seen through dark windows, but still the Thunder is very far off.



Okay, I can see I'll have to stop for now, I just fell asleep writing this at my computer.  But that's the whole point of telling myself this story.  So my mind will quiet and I can go to sleep.

I hope you sleep well too.

Tea For Tue : Another Story from Tea With Whimsy

Three weeks ago, I posted A Bedtime Story I Tell Myself, which became the beginning to a story called Tea With Whimsy.  Here was the next installment originally written as a blog post on September 30, 2013 and titled Gathering Herbs in the Moonlight.  If you'd like to read the first post, just click the link below.

Gathering Herbs in the Moonlight

(Continued from A Bedtime Story I Tell Myself)

She straightens up and hands me her basket, and without a word bends over and goes back to cutting herbs.  She's never surprised when I arrive.  Whimsy is always expecting someone to show up, and of course they always do.

I stand shivering in the moonlight holding the basket, which fills up as Whimsy continues to snip herbs crooning softly as she works.  And I notice, that she seems to be singing a love song to the plants, like a mother singing a lullaby to a beloved child.  A small sigh of contentment seems to ripple round the garden, and I begin to feel not so chilled as before--as if someone just pulled a blanket up around my chin and tucked me in.

When the basket is over flowing, she straightens up and onto her toes, raising her arms over her head and stretching hugely.  She beams at me and invites me to come inside.

We enter through the kitchen door, and the warmth and the smell of fresh baked bread wrap around me like a soothing embrace.  I look around at the tidy kitchen and think about my own never quite clean kitchen, with the dishes in the sink, the crumbs on the counter, and unswept floor.

"And that's why you can't sleep at night!"

"Hey", I protest weakly.

"Well...your thoughts are very loud." 

I know they can be at times, and so I just nod and cock my head to one side raising my eyebrows, while she continues.

"It's true, though.  You've got a lot of..." and here she searches for a word and gestures, flourishing her hand around over and around my head.  Into my mind's eye comes a picture of a black tangled ball like a scribble on paper when someone is trying to get the ink to flow in a sluggish pen.  "...snarled energy", she finishes.  "You've got a lot on your plate right now.  Why do you want to be such a glutton and take on so much?  Are you sure you're not biting off more than you can chew?"

"Stop with the food analogies, you're making me hungry!"

Her eyes sparkle.  "Let's have some toast." 

And now my eyes are sparkling, and I nod my head enthusiastically in agreement.


That seems like a good stopping place for now.  (I think I'll have some toast--more later).


After all these years, I still remember that it was nearly midnight when I posted Gathering Herbs in the Moonlight.  I ended with "I think I'll have some toast..." and just as I was shutting down my computer, my husband Mike came out of the bedroom.  He had just woken up hungry.  The first words out of his mouth were, "Did you say something about toast?"

At that time he still didn't even know I was writing Tea With Whimsy, nor that I was having insomnia.  But somehow, he picked up on the suggestion of toast.  I love that form of communication.  And it figures prominently in Tea With Whimsy.

Tea For Tue: Tea With Whimsy--Who is Telling the Story?

In Tea With Whimsy, the story takes place through a narrator.  But who is this person?

When I first began writing this as a blog, it started out as the fictional ramblings of an insomniac.  But the story took on a life of its own, and I had to start writing it more seriously, editing and developing characters and so on, which is why I stopped blogging it.

The narrator of the story introduced herself to me as Annwyl.  She pronounces her name like the words,  Anewil to rhyme with A-jewel.  I looked up the name and found out it was of Welsh origin, and that it meant beloved one.

Annwyl eventually told me that she and Seren are Whimsy's sisters, which wasn't clear in the early blog posts, but the more I wrote, the more the characters told me about their personal lives, just as it is when you meet someone.  They don't tell you everything all at once.  The longer you know someone, the more personal details that someone shares with you.  And so it is with this story as well.

So Annwyl began telling me things about her life, and a funny thing has happened.  Even though Annwyl is not me and I am not her, she and I have similar things that we do in life.  After all I have to have some point of reference from which to present the story.

While I do have three cats and I am a book binder by trade, I don't have 3 sisters, and I don't know anyone who can communicate the way Annwyl and Whimsy do, although I believe anything is possible.

Whimsy's lifestyle fascinates me, and I've had people tell me they want to be Whimsy and live like she does.  Whimsy's lack of modern conveniences stems from my disillusionment as a householder caused by my own plumbing and electrical problems.  I'd rather just do without all those built in "conveniences" that become so inconvenient when you have to tear out a wall or replace a floor.  Whimsy's cottage is small and simple.  She is a minimalist.  She lives off her land.  She is mostly self sufficient.

She's really old school.

She lives the way my parents did when they were kids, and the way I would like to live.  That life is hard work.  But I think it's even harder work to go to a job you have little or no feeling for everyday, working for someone else just to make money to buy your food.  Why not just grow it?  Work is work.  There are 24 hours in each day whether you spend it working for yourself or someone else.  There are ways.  People all over the planet are finding ways to live life on their own terms.  With a little creative thinking, it can be done.

That is something Whimsy and I agree on wholeheartedly.

(This post originally appeared in Tea With Whimsy as a blog post on January 12, 2015)

The Origins of Tea With Whimsy

Every now and again I refer to Tea With Whimsy in my writing.  Whimsy and I go waaaayyyy back.  Today I'd like to talk a little bit about Tea With Whimsy, where the idea came from and how it has evolved.

Once upon a time, way back in 1992, I began writing a story called Tea With Whimsy.  It was a day dream ramble about a very young woman living alone in Seattle, who finds herself in an Alice in Wonderland type adventure, and I think it's safe to say that it was heavily influenced by old movies and TV shows which featured witches.

As circumstances would have it, we ended up moving a couple of times and I lost track of Tea With Whimsy.  Not only that, I mostly stopped writing anything.  But even though I lost the original story, I never forgot the title.

Two decades later, I discovered blogging.  I posted every day for months when I first began, I was that hungry to write.  But even in those days, though I was writing non fiction accounts of my thoughts and experiences, I began to realize they were a bit bizarre for public consumption.  And because I was writing so much, my creative imagination woke up and wanted to express itself.  I decided I needed a separate blog to write fiction.

I remembered Tea With Whimsy, and thought maybe I could rediscover the story if I began blogging it.  So that became the title of my story writing blog.  

To test the waters, I started writing short story posts.  In fact, several of the stories I wrote for Tea With Whimsy,  eventually found their way into Hearth & Heart.

After a year of posting stories in Tea With Whimsy, I began to have trouble sleeping and so I regularly stayed up late and wrote until I fell asleep at my computer.  That's when Tea With Whimsy became a story instead of a blog.  Starting as a serialized story, it grew and took on a life of it's own.  

Eventually, I fell in love with the characters and their world. The story began to tell itself.  I took the posted fragments and began to work on it seriously and discontinued the blog.   

It was thanks to that blog that I began writing stories again.  Tea With Whimsy led me to write other works which later became Winter Tales, and the Hearth & Heart series.  Now I write daily.  When I'm not creating story content for my zines, I am posting stories for my Patrons on Patreon, or I am writing stories here on this blog for my feature the Saturday Breakfast Serial.

This feature Tea for Tue, is a way to turn my thoughts back to Tea With Whimsy.  By writing about Whimsy, I know it will stimulate me to get back to telling that story.  I plan to use this feature to post updates on how the story is coming along, as well as back ground on the characters.

If you're interested in how Tea With Whimsy is progressing, follow me here, or you can get updates on facebook if that's easier for you, by liking and following  https://www.facebook.com/TeaWithWhimsy/  .  I know it would help motivate me to know you were interested and reading.  And I always welcome constructive feedback.  

Tea With Whimsy

One of the reasons I joined Patreon was to help inspire me and keep me disciplined to carry on with my writing.  I had allowed myself to relegate story telling to my lowest priority.  

Tea With Whimsy was a story I began writing on September 15, 2013 because I couldn't sleep at night.  It was a way to lose myself in a story.  To sooth my mind, and keep it from cycling through a to do list which was keeping me awake.

I stopped writing for nearly two years, and decided Patreon would help get me back on track.  And while it did get me writing and creating constantly since joining in mid August, I still have not gotten back to work on Tea With Whimsy, which is the story I love to write above all others.

So now I'd like to share the very first lines of Tea With Whimsy, which began with a post I titled...

A Bedtime Story I Tell Myself

It's after Midnight, and I find that I can not sleep.  So I slip out my front door and into the night.  My feet find the way for me...They read the ground...They know it even through my shoes.  And my spine stretches up and up into the night air.  I grow taller as I walk.

My feet take me off the paved road and onto the road not paved.  The road that has grass growing between the tire tracks, and around me in the darkness I get glimpses of four legged folk.  Some are wild and some live with people.

On I walk.  The night air tickles my nostrils with scent of green and earth and water...some fragrances come stronger in certain places, like the spot along the road where the fragrance of cedar stands out stronger than it had been, or where the road comes close to a small stream and the smell of the water comes to you even before the song of the water reaches your ears.

I look back, and I see Coyote following behind me.

I laugh at him and he laughs back.

And Owl laughs too, because he gets the joke.

And a little rustle of laughter rises up from the land around me in the stones and the plants and the water and the wind.  And the frogs decide this would be a good time to resume their song.

Ahead in the darkness, I can see the dim moonlight glow off a white picket fence.  My hand finds the latch and as I step through the gate, the clouds part to reveal the face of the waxing moon nearly full, lighting the grounds of the cottage which is Whimsy's house.

And at that, I practically trip over her bent over there in the path gathering herbs in the moonlight.



I'm tired -- more later...

Do frogs sing after midnight?  You bet they do.


And that was the beginning of Tea With Whimsy.  I hope you enjoyed that little tiny bit of it.  I enjoyed writing it.  Night after night, I would post a little bit more whenever I couldn't sleep.  And always it would relax me and help to heal me of insomnia as I would write.

Later, as it became a growing story, I stopped blogging it and began to write it in earnest as a full length book.  Then for some reason, I no longer remember, I stopped and just never got back to it.

But I'm ready to pick up the threads again and hopefully see it through to the end.