Windows

Many years ago someone told my husband that he looked at his life like a window of time. Every other person who has ever lived has their own window and sometimes, by miracle or happenstance, your window overlaps with someone special.

With billions of people on the planet I look at the most special people (not related to me) in my life and sometimes wonder how I was so fortunate as to have our windows overlap.

My experience blogging and writing has only served to make these moments of gratitude more frequent. I have readers who have been with me from the very beginning. They comment and drop me notes and have made this experience feel so personal and important. (Thank you.) There are the people from all over the planet who wrote essays for my book or who have read it and let me know how they felt about it. There was the woman in Singapore whose husband found the book in an airport in Indonesia. Really? There are tea folks that I have admired all my tea life and I finally got to meet like Norwood Pratt and Jane Pettigrew. They have made my life richer simply by those small moments.

Twitter has been a whole other experience. I had avoided Twitter for a long time. 140 characters seemed like just enough to be a major time waster. I liked writing long blog posts (too long, more than likely). I wanted to be thorough and I could barely manage posting regularly on the blog AND trying to write other things AND get some kind of Facebook page up. I just never got to it. Finally I gave in and set up an account. I began to find more tea folks there. I found my new Tea Trade friends over there and lots of my industry contacts. Before I knew it I was saying things like "Twitterverse" to my husband. (I can't say that he was impressed.) At World Tea East I finally had the chance to put some faces to names and was reminded of how powerful a tool like Twitter can be. It's like a global meet up.

There is a point to posting this. Today is a difficult day for many of us over in Twitter land. Two days ago I received a message from one of my tea/writer friends that said simply "our Milly has passed away" with a hyperlink. I found that the link was to his blog with a beautiful tribute to an equally beautiful lady who went by @MildewPea . I didn't even know until that day that her name was Diane. As far as I was concerned she was Milly and she was as British as an American in Indiana could be. I think that was one of the reasons I took to her so much. She was the Anglophile I sometimes find myself striving to be. Her profile pic showed her smartly dressed in tweed with a big tea mug adorned with a Union Jack.

I remember times in my life when I lost someone close to me and I suddenly felt like others were trying to "claim" that person. Like in high school, when there is a loss and suddenly everyone was that person's best friend. I was not Milly's best friend. I am sure I was barely on her radar screen. But no matter. She was on mine. I immediately felt happier when I saw that profile picture. I smiled at her kindnesses and the way that she always cheered everyone else up. I smirked when she broke out of her "very proper" style and said something naughty, but only naughty in a very dignified way.

I've tried to figure out why the news struck me so deeply. I've never met Milly. I've only communicated with her one-on-one a handful of times. I think for me it was the reminder that these tea friends I've made may be virtual in some ways but they are real people with real lives. They face heartbreaks and pain and love and joy. As with all friendships, they are only as strong as the work you put into them. 140 characters can make relationships pretty superficial unless you read between those lines.

So tonight I want to close by saying thank you. Thank you to those of you who write to me and comment on the blog. Thank you for inspiring me and supporting my tea writing habit. Thank you for helping me to know you and for overlapping with my life at this moment. And now I raise my cup (I thought my mug from Harrods with the double-decker buses would be appropriate) and tonight I remember Milly.