It was the middle of January when I went to visit Nick while he was living in France. It was cold and dark, and even though his tiny apartment was well-heated, I’d come in from outside shivering. He would immediately set about preparing vanilla tea. There wasn’t anything special about it. Plain vanilla tea. But every time we came in from outside, he would ask if I wanted tea, and every time, my answer was “ooooh, yes please!” When I got back to Houston, one of the first things I did was buy a box of vanilla teabags from the grocery store. Though I still occasionally buy a new box, especially during the winter, it has never tasted the same as it did in France.
It’s funny how certain things become so entwined with certain places and events. It seems to happen most often with foods and smells, perhaps because my habits, likes, and dislikes seem to change when I am traveling. An experience strikes me while I am far from home and I know, sadly, that I will never be able to remember the exact, exquisite feeling once I have returned to Houston and rejoined my everyday life. So I look for the little things, the ones that will send me daydreaming back on my travels, if only for a moment.
To me, orchids are now synonymous with the thrill of meeting someone new and hiking the Inca Trail. A good curry makes me smile with thoughts of the crazy singing potter in Scotland. I pass a gelato — oh, mmm, gelato — stand and whoosh, I’m hopping off a water taxi in Venice. Nescafe puts me back on the ferry across the Aegean to Santorini.
And vanilla tea will always be that week in France, coming in from the chill of a Provence winter.
