This last weekend, we took the lightrail to downtown Denver and walked to a place that I’d read about online called “TeaLee’s Tea House & Bookstore,” a Black-owned business in Denver’s historic Five Points neighborhood that serves a high tea.

 

The space is in a brick building, filled with tea cups and pots of various vintages. Jazz and R&B are on continuous play, and the smell of scones baking pervades everything. To walk in is to feel your mouth water.

 

The high tea was what I would call in conversation with the concept of British high tea—with sweets and scones and little open-faced toasted sandwiches that were absolutely dripping with flavor, which British high tea sometimes does not actually do. But it started with a quiche and a salad.

 

The website says that high tea will take two hours, and this is not a lie. The experience is leisurely: the proprietor, Rise Jones, will brew your tea to exacting perfection before delivering it in a teapot that is kept warm with a tea light. We had a handful of teas, including a jasmine green tea that was delicate and sweet.

 

The promise was that the experience would “move to the rhythm of tea,” and in a world where it feels like everything is rushed—where you are seated and whisked from start to finish as quickly as possible so that someone else can be put in your seat and revenue maximized in that way—this felt like the opposite: a time to stop and look out the window at a blue autumn sky against the Denver skyline, and to relax and take a breath.

 

If you’re ever in Denver, and want to spend a leisurely handful of hours with a tea pot and jazz, this is a great place to go.

You can visit TeaLee’s Tea House & Bookstore online to make reservations for high tea, or just to check out the menu.

I can’t tell you how much I needed that little Saturday refresh. I don’t know if it’s been obvious from Weekly Tea, but this has been a hard month for trying to get things done, and that includes having the brain space to sit down with tea and actually write what feels like a good newsletter.

 

Some of it is the normal impending doom of, you know, an entire election deciding whether democracy gets to continue to exist in the country I was born in. But October has also been A Lot.

 

The month started with my husband coming back from a night shift in the rain, hitting a puddle and losing control of the car and running into a pole. He was fine (luckily). But the car was totaled, a thing that it took the insurance a few weeks to figure out. A few days after he hit the pole, while I was parked somewhere else, someone threw a rock through the moonroof of my car. And then, a few days after that, a rock flew up on the highway and cracked the windshield of the rental car that we had temporarily.

 

All of this has required a lot of additional work: talking to the insurance company, getting a rental, extending the rental, extending the rental again, talking to the rental company about the damage, arranging to get my moonroof replaced (non-trivial for a car from 1993), figuring out the details of getting things done, figuring out a car replacement, getting a level 2 charger for the car replacement, being told when the electricians go into the crawl space to run the wires to install the charger that we apparently have a slow plumbing leak that now we need to figure out…

 

I shake my fist at October.

 

That’s enough complaining. This annoyance has really highlighted how lucky we’ve been in the times that haven’t been annoying like this. My car has been functional with minimal maintenance work for the sixteen years during we’ve owned it; this is the first accident that either of us have ever been in. Plumbing issues are to be expected in a house from the 1950s, and it’s probably better that we found out about the leak now rather than five years from now. 

And since we’re having the electrician come in now, we’re having them install a 240 V plug for an induction range, so that when our gas range finally kicks the bucket (which I suspect will not be long), we don’t have to wait for electrician availability.

 

It is still a lot of extra work at a time when my executive function feels like it is being pulled like taffy through a sieve. So this week, the newsletter reflects that some times, the brain is just not here to do anything but get through whatever nonsense stands in the way.

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