One of the sure ways to get me to try a tea is by saying “this is not like anything you’ve tried before.” So anyway, I was checking out Verdant Tea (new to me tea vendor), and I saw that they had tea made from the leaves of camellia crassicolumna.

 

Modern, cultivated tea comes from camellia sinensis. Crassicolumna is a close relative, but one that wasn’t cultivated. I thought—well, interesting. Let’s see what it‘s like.

 

The smell was…a little bit like tea, a little bit…weird. The taste was a little bit like tea and a little bit…weird. It was not exactly bad, but you know that feeling when you’re drinking milk and it hasn’t actually gone off yet, but you kind of got the feeling that if you left it in the fridge for another day, it would be done? Yeah. That was what this tasted like.

 

I have learned a valuable lesson about why there’s more than a millennia devoted to the cultivation of camellia sinensis, and none at all devoted to camellia crassicolumna. I’m not exactly not recommending it—if you want to know what it tastes like, sure, go ahead. But I’m not really recommending it.

My husband was looking at the X-ray of my broken big toe before the orthopedist came into the room for my appointment. In full ER-doctor mode, he was saying things like “yup, that’s a ratty looking no-good comminuted fracture.” I did not know what comminuted meant, and he did not define. I got to look it up later: broken into many pieces.

 

Apparently if I was going to break any one-inch bone in my body, I picked the exact one-inch bone that would wreak the maximum havoc on my life, and spent approximately two days stewing. Of all the things my ADHD brain does not like doing, “sitting very still and not moving much” is very high up the list.

 

Over the weekend, I was reminded of a time when I injured myself extremely badly (and semi-permanently) because I could not make myself believe that perhaps if something hurts you should stop doing it. A friend asked me what I would say to my old self in that circumstance.

 

Back then, I didn’t know that trying to force myself to do things was going to make what could have been a one-time thing into a chronic tendon condition that would last decades. I thought about it for a moment and finally realized I would have said: “You deserve to heal.”

 

I am still very uncomfortable with this concept, but it turns out I have a lot of time to sit with it.

 

This is going to be a short newsletter because it turns out that when your body is healing one inch of comminuted bone, it actually gets exhausted by fairly normal activities, like sitting at a desk to write newsletters, and so I’ve been trying to reserve that time for working on books.

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