Bryan Cook

Brown Betty

The widow dies in the old clapboard farmhouse. For decades she’s chored over chickens and cows, preserves and pickles, and three meals a day for a hardworking man and a brood of children now gone to the city. Her worries were comforted by mugs of tea brewed on the hob from sunrise to sunset, tannic jolts of caffeine. She welcomed neighbours and tradesfolk with “cuppas” poured for the occasion from her treasured “Brown Betty” teapot brought over from the “old country” in her grandmother’s steamer trunk.

Not your high society filigree bone-china pot of Wedgwood or Royal Doulton, but the uncrackable, unchippable, undrippable choice of the British working class. Red clay, thrown on a Staffordshire potter’s wheel, stamped “Made in England” and double fired with Rockingham dark manganese glaze; her glossy deep caramel surface never showing tea stains and easily rinsed by Victorian housewives. Her pot-belly swirling the boiling water and loose tea leaves to scalded perfection.

The children clear out their mother’s life, selling off her heirloom pearls, saving a few mementos that might suit their minimalist decors, and consigning the rest to Salvation Army’s shelves. “Brown Betty” collects dust, ignored until my bride declares that we should get a reliable six “cuppa” to serve with the newspaper in our retirement years.

Brown Betty’s now resplendent in her cozy, quilted for a church bazaar. Her warmth comforts our souls.

in the potting shed
steaming mugs
and hand-rolled “ciggies”
the dawn chorus
still lingering

---

About the Author

Bryan Cook is an alumnus of Sheffield and McGill Universities and retired from directing Canada’s energy science and technology. He now pursues interests in Canadian history, genealogy and genetics, fishing, gardening, poetry, and fine woodworking. He is one of those weird types who love cosmology, the physics of relativity and quanta, and the bluegrass banjo! Bryan is mentored through Ottawa’s TREE Reading Series and the KaDo Haiku and Tanka Society. He is a published writer of haiku and haibun and won the 2019 Genjuan Haibun international competition.