I wish I could remember who started me on the path to tea, but I know that it has been a quiet presence in my life's background since college, as I believe Sperry drank tea regularly. I have no doubt that in the passing years I have been offered many a cup and turned them down due to lack of familiarity.I believe it may have been Gareth, when he stayed with us a few years ago, bringing a box of tea with him and having a cup during even the hottest days of summer.

There is silence, scented with bergamot, and a cup of tea that more than one friend has told me whose leaves smell "more like a big sweaty guy named Earl than some proper English tea called Earl Grey."

In the past month, the angle of the sun has changed enough that the guest bedroom now sees bright slats of midafternoon light. For the sixth autumn straight, the cats have made it a point to sunbathe and drowse amidst the motes. They doze in tangles of brotherly paws and tails, kitty-snoring into each others' ears amidst the fresh-folded laundry.

The cats are six years old now, a fact unintentionally reinforced by the yearly vet visit. I think Dr. Namie must have just recently started his veterinary practice when we brought our new kittens to him, but in the six years that we have visited him, his hair has turned from reddish-blond to silvery red as our Humane Society adoptees have turned from two-pound kittens to truly enormous bringers of fangbreath.

"And you may find yourself in another part of the world And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself - well … how did I get here?"

— Talking Heads, "Once In A Lifetime"

Time passes, and I have become twenty-nine. My mother is sixty-two. My grandmother is eighty-five.

When we were picked up at the airport on Thursday, the passage of time struck a square, clean blow. Stephanie had told me quietly, privately, that Dan would look a little different than the last time I had seen him, and I had spent several minutes after her statement trying to imagine exactly what she meant. When I saw, I understood; the change was as thorough as it was indescribable. I had known a teenager; this was a man.

While different in every instance, lives fully lived develop a semblance of trajectory, of path, of periods containing elements and events that hold a great deal of commonality no matter whose individual experience they are. Our awareness fades in amidst schooling, and deepens through our first major life choices. There are no clear boundaries, but most of us have moved past initial schooling into stable marriages and jobs. We've begun the process of marrying, birthing, and burying in earnest; the time of adulthood often brings all three at once, in no particular order.

That first night of our visit, we sprawled ourselves out over various bits of furniture, in a barely-unpacked living room, and the question came up, as I knew it would: when had we last seen each other? I knew the answer, had thought about it countless times on the flight up to Detroit, but could not bring myself to say the words, even though I knew Jeff remembered it as well as I did.

"We spent Saturday in Nashville with Dan, who was in from Michigan to help the UMich lacrosse team out (he videotapes their games). We spent an absolutely wonderful day there with him, and drove back in the early evening.

When we arrived home at ten p.m., there was a message on the machine from my grandmother, letting me know that Dad had begun to have trouble breathing in the middle of the afternoon, and that his blood oxygen saturation levels had dropped to around 68 percent. Dad was transported by ambulance to the nearest hospital, and was transferred to the cancer ward at Baptist in Little Rock as soon as a bed became available.

After speaking with my grandmother, my sister called me from a pay phone.

'Come home. Now. Dad probably will not live through the night.'"

- "Comfort care, a matter of time." (18 March 2002)

The answer is deceptively simple: the day I last saw Dan was the last one before my adulthood was undeniable, even to me. I would have asked if I looked as different to them as they do to me now, but I know the answer: trajectories are as subtle as they are undeniable, and indeed, I have changed.

Yet the core is still the same: the spark, the indefinable central point that defines a personality. We were changed, but not unrecognizable. Our hands are squarer, more solid; our chins have rounded and, in some cases, multiplied cheerfully in captivity. We bash the vagaries of mortgages with the same cheerful abandon we once reserved for fraternity brothers and collegiate foibles.

In comparison, my cats know sunbeams and the sure comfort of warm laundry. Simplicity, not richness. They have no stories of the joy of discovering Lebanese bakeries or the maddening frustration of Utica U-turns. They sleep, they purr, they groom, with catlike certainty that tomorrow will be exactly like today.

We know better.

It had been four years since I had seen Stephanie, and three since I'd seen Dan. I remember hugging them, feeling their solidity and their friendship, and thinking, "Amy, you are a moron; why did you wait so long?"

There are no answers, but there is tea. It will have to suffice.

Music: Underworld, "Sola Sistim."

Edmund, most of the time, is too lazy to work up the effort to squeeze out a full-fledged meow, instead settling for a meaningful glance, occasionally laced with a whiskertwitch or two. Only when he is annoyed (defined as "my brother kitty will not play with me when I bite him on the ass") does he really feel the need to actually audibly voice his opinion. Today was no exception, but even without the vocalization, I got the point.

Yes, it is Harry Potter Release Day, which means you and yours are probably slathering at the bit to get your grimy little midnight hands on Harry Potter V. On behalf of my friend Jessica and all of the other hapless dreading bookstore salesclerks in the world, I'd like to wrest this day back from Mr. Potter and Ms. Rowling and declare it the Official Be Nice To Salesclerk Day.

I slipped by the local Books-A-Dozen on Jessica's tip to pay for the little piece of paper that means I won't have to stand in line to buy the latest of Mr. Potter's escapades. Instead, all I will have to do is park the car (possibly a challenge), walk to the door (only a challenge if I forget my contact lenses) and toddle up to the line that says "Exchange Slips For Books Here."

Barring unforeseen forgettings of contact lenses or unfortunate and accidental poking-out of eyes after parking, I suspect this shall not be difficult.

Do you drink coffee? I've tried, and I've come to the conclusion that there are two types of people in this world: coffee drinkers, and those who wish that coffee tasted even a little bit as good as the promise of its smell.

I fall squarely into the latter category.

It's a wonderful smell, coffee, rich and thick, smelling like an olfactory cross between velvet, chocolate, and good shoe leather. A mug of coffee is possibly the only single object in the world capable of warming a pair of cold hands faster than a snuggling, purring cat; there's something comforting about the warm haze of steam rising from the cup to your face as you prepare to drink.

Its aficionados tell me that the experience of drinking the coffee is just as good is the ritual of preparation that comes before it. I cannot vouch for that. My perfect cup of coffee sits in my hands, perpetually radiating warmth from mug to skin, sending trails of scent to my nose, and never once touches my lips.

In the past two weeks I've migrated from "having a cup of tea in the evening when Gareth makes it" to "time for my evening cup of tea."

"The house is quiet," I said when Jeff called this afternoon."Well, it wasn't as if it wasn't quiet before. Gareth probably wasn't making a lot of noise while he was here. But I know what you mean." Over the line, I could hear the smile. Stay married long enough and you start to automatically translate what your partner said into what they actually meant to say.

By my watch, Gareth is probably home now, or close to it. The typical mammalian brain, even when saddled with a working understanding of the vagaries of air travel, sometimes has trouble grasping that the damp towel left in the bathroom this morning was left by someone who went halfway across the world today.