image from google
I read Nene's Reading Tea Leaves over at Life Whispers just now, and it took me back to having tea with my Grandma when I was a kid. Thanks, Nene, for the trip down Memory Lane!
Grandma was proud of being Irish,
her mother coming to the Prairies
straight from County Cork.
In the afternoons,
we'd have tea,
and then turn our cups
upside down
in the pretty Baleek saucers.
"Turn your cup around three times,"
Grandma would intone portentously,
her eyes twinkling,
giving me that Grandma smile,
and we'd turn:
one, two, three.
Then we'd peer into the bottoms of our cups.
I was always looking
for Home,
for good luck,
and for Love.
What I got were
donkeys, women pushing wheelbarrows
and the occasional bird.
A bird was very lucky.
When I was a teen,
Grandma had the fortune-telling game
called Gong Hee Fot Choy.
You thought about your wish
as you shuffled the deck
and, the weird thing was,
it really worked.
The cards foretold it coming true,
and I suppose,
in the end,
it really did,
though never in the ways
I once had dreamed.
More like a combined nightmare/
comedy of errors,
but in the end I can say
home, good luck and love
each, in their time,
found me
and left me
all the richer
for passing through.
