Just Me and 500 of My Favorite Morning Beverages...

[Written in the style of a young adult novel.]

Ding-dong.

The doorbell snapped me from a reverie of writing keyword-rich online content intended solely to satisfy the insatiable spiders created by search engines. I turned briskly from my standing desk and hurried to the door. As I fumbled with the knob, the bell rang again, twice. Ding-dong, ding-dong. I scampered down the dusty front stairs.

"Package for Brenna," said the delivery man. I signed for it.

I'm Brenna, as you probably guessed. And I had a pretty good idea what was in the box, seeing as I'd ordered it from the Internet about a week before. I bounded back upstairs and dropped the package on the kitchen table, then sliced it open with a steak knife.

If my life were a movie, a golden light would have glowed on my face from the open box, while a heavenly chorus sounded in the background. Unfortunately, I'm just a freelance writer who lives in Chicago. But what did shine in my face was green tea. Five-hundred bags of it, to be precise.

I felt the grin spread over my face like a bout of impetigo through a preschool. At last. The days of jittery java gulping were over. I turned to the camera for a closeup.

Hiiiiiiii, Mooooooommmm.

How to Make Green Tea.

I really appreciate how manufacturers provide step-by-step instructions on the packaging for taking a food from ingredient to finished product. For example, this bag of green tea.

Without these concise, three-step directions, how would I ever have been able to create this little masterpiece?

I wouldn't have been able to, that's how.

Cheaper Per Ounce.

As an avid comparison shopper, I frequently come home from the grocery store with large containers of things we eat because, as I so often repeat to your father, the larger sizes are typically cheaper per ounce.


Despite this undeniable wisdom, your father persists in giving me a hard time about the quantities of various foodstuffs I buy. When I came home one day with this box of green tea, for example, he said, "One-hundred bags of green tea? We're never going to drink all that!"

Never, you say? THEN WHY IS THE BOX COMPLETELY EMPTY, JOHN? HMMMM?

Some Verse.

Two poets, both alike in dignity,

In my fair kitchen, where I lay my scene,

From liquor store and from the grocery,

One is a beer and one is tea that’s green.

From forth the tasty drops of these two drinks

Another poet finds her will to write;

Why wake at all without these two, methinks?

And how to start the day or end the night?

The quaffing of your mother’s constant thirst,

And the clearing of her brain’s daily smog,

Which happens in the early morning first,

Is now this entry’s traffic of her blog.

(And you thought poetry was dull and bland—

Not when it springs forth from your mother’s hand!)