My friend Judy had the loveliest tea cozy I ever saw. It was big and fluffy and kept her tea piping hot. I wanted one just like it to use when company comes and asked her to try and find me one. She bought hers at a market, and even though she looked every time she went back, she could not find another. Unfortunately, it left me with having to wrap a towel around my tea pot. Not cool – especially when company was around.

Anyway, away I go to Afghanistan where, of course, there are no tea cozies. In fact, I was probably lucky to get any tea at all. One stinking cold, snowy, windy day a package arrived from Judy. I opened her package and… you guessed it: my dear old friend had found and sent me a tea cozy from half way around the world. I took it out of the box, pulled it over my head, and wore it to the main house for supper. Darned if it wasn’t the warmest hat I ever had. Thank you Judy!

It’s funny that I would have two tea cozy stories. Sadly, there are some people out there who have no tea cozy stories and here I am with two of them.

It was early in my career and I was working on a medical floor in a big Toronto hospital. There was a patient who was always snarly and miserable and no one wanted to go into her room. She once threw a bedpan at a nurse. (Thank goodness it was empty.) One evening she happened to be one of my patients, so I popped in early in the shift to introduce myself and say hello.

“Hi!” I said cheerily, “I’m Bonnie your nurse for this evening.” “You can just turn around and take your cheery ass out of here” was her response. This woman had a terminal illness and she was mad at the world and everyone in it. She had no visitors and even the staff for obvious reason didn’t come in her room any more often than they had to. She even heaved a plant against the wall and scared the crap out of a housekeeper.

This evening, a nurse brought in her dinner tray and was told to “shove the stale white bread up her ass.” Yikes, I thought as I now had to go in and get the tray. I went to the broom closet and got a mop, tied a white towel to it, and poked it into her room waving it around like a wild woman. Finally she grumbled, “What do you want?”

I stuck my head in and said I needed two things. “I want your empty dinner tray and I want to talk to you.” She gestured toward the tray and I removed it. Then I came back in and sat by her bed watching her knit for a while. She finally put her knitting down and said loudly, “What the hell do you want?” I said, “I’ve got this tiny single cup teapot and I want you to knit a tea cozy for me. In response all she said was “Fine.”

The next day, I brought in the teapot and left it with her. A few days later when I got back to work the little tea cozy was done. I told her it was perfect and thanked her for doing it for me. She said, “I didn’t do it for you, it just gave me something to do.”

She died about two weeks later and was angry until the end. I never could get her to talk to me about how she was feeling. I never knew her story. I only know that all this happened more than thirty-five years ago. I still have the tea cozy and use it almost every day. I don’t remember her name, only that she was the angry tea cozy lady.