Nanny’s Tea

by Meaghan Elliott Dittrich

Two cups on the kitchen table:
porcelain English bone china
that never chipped or cracked.
Each cup edged with different flowers.

Her apartment on Princess Street
where she, still in the pale blue robe
and slippers, boiled water for tea,
set out milk and sugar. 

The kitchen held light
even on those mornings
when fog hung over the bay until
at least ten, or longer.

The fog brought salt to mix with the tea
and was a steady visitor.
I complained when it didn’t come,
complained when it did.

It blended with apartment smells:
perfume of Irish Spring soap,
day-old date squares,
and smog from the city center.

Her skin,
the smoothness at 71, 72, 73 years,
like the milk in our tea,
or seawater’s surface on calm days.

She toasted bread,
scratched butter and jam.
And the dryness in my mouth
made for a better cuppa tea.

Orange pekoe steeped in steaming water.
The tea-filled gauze bloomed in our cups,
stronger, darker.
Then we sweetened.

Now I boil water, set out cups
and saucers like she once did.
Steam rolls out the kettle—
the color of Fundy fog.

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Meaghan Elliott Dittrich grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and holds a BA from Hope College, an MFA from the University of Wyoming, an MA in literature and PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of New Hampshire, where she is currently the Writing Programs and Writing Center Director. She has poems published in Rattle Magazine, The Midwest Literary Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, The New Plains Review, The Trombonist, Moon Journal, Open Window, and OCEAN Magazine, and was the second place winner for the 2009 Wyoming Writer's Contest. She currently lives in Dover, NH with her husband and two children.