Rosebud tea

So I'm sitting here with a cup of steaming rosebud tea, one of my gifts from B. on her recent visit. If there's one word that comes to mind as I sip it, it is subtlety, a quality that makes me stop and think and let it linger on my tongue in an attempt to catch the flavor before it disappears. I have always loved the flavors of good black tea (I have long since exhausted the Marco Polo that C. gave me and desperately need to buy some more), and have enjoyed the more delicate aroma of scented greens. But the rosebud tea surpasses even those in its slight but full fragrance.

I was flipping through a book tonight that I checked out from the library. Most of you know my ongoing fascination with Virginia Woolf. It started years ago. I have read her biographies, many of her letters, her journals, and all of her novels. But until now, I had not yet read her correspondence with Vita Sackville-West, the well-known author and socialite of the time with whom Virginia carried on a long and nebulous affair of the emotions. Looking through the book tonight and reading bits and pieces of their letters to each other, I am reminded of the rosebud tea. There are hints and descriptions of elusive emotions everywhere, but rarely a full-blown expression of passion. The minds of two of the most brilliant women of the day dance around each other in a brilliant intellectual courtship that may or may not have ever been fully consummated. And yet, reading the letters, you get the distinct impression that the consummation was not really the point. The point was in the dance...in the ever-circling, entrancing game that they played with each other, sometimes drawing closer, sometimes pulling back. They hurt each other, and forgave. They spent their evenings thinking one of the other, and reveled in their loneliness. They bolstered each other's creative genius, tore down confidence, and built it back up. They let words of angry jealousy fly, despite the complete absence of any commitment or profession of love between them. But in the end, they loved each other without fail until Virginia's self-inflicted death in 1941.

So I am reminded again, as I take the last sip of my tea and prepare to shut down the house for the night, that it is the elusive in life that often is the most valuable, because the hardest to capture. The flash of a smile on a baby's face. The lingering aroma of a perfume, the name of which you forget. The maybe-love that flutters for years and never dies, yet never quite fully lives. The glimpses, swiftly seen, of something that makes us hang on to life for just another minute. These are the slight intensities I cherish.