On the appreciation of drinking tea with friends

I try not to complain, but the problem with having my desk in the hottest room in the house is that it's also the coldest room in the house. Because it's the only room in the house. I live in a shack with banana-leaves for walls. My friends come to visit sometimes, but not often.

https://pixabay.com/en/winter-snow-nature-frozen-shack-3144650/

When my friends visit, I offer them tea. "No milk," I say, a sheepish grin hidden under my unkempt chicken-liver moustache. There is milk, but it's reserved for the cat, and I don't feel like explaining that every time. So I lie, and I say there's no milk, in my banana-leaf shack.

"That's fine," they say, or sometimes they say "oh, okay," or "ah, don't worry about it then". Different people react differently to the situation; it is hard to summarise in one sentence. But there is a certain structure to the reactions, and most cases do not deviate too far from this structure.

While my visitor is drinking their tea – if they accepted it – I pull on my footwraps, then my boots, and finally my galoshes. I keep these items inside a small basket by the door, except for the footwraps. On visitation days, I rise at dawn to hang my footwraps above the mantelpiece, to warm.

When I first arrived at my shack, I tried to keep strict hygiene between inside shoes and outside shoes. Over time this hygiene deteriorated, and now I wear the galoshes as I please. In the house, out of the house; it doesn't matter. Sometimes I stomp my feet on the dry leaf floor, and we listen to the clomping together.

Some of my friends are more amused by this than others, but it never fails to stir in me some deep feeling of satisfaction. I enjoy seeing the transformation in my friends' faces as I stomp up and down. If I am lucky, tea will dribble out of their mouth, and I collect it in a jar.

I catalogue each jar with the visitor's name, along with the date, and type of tea. Soon enough, my research will be complete, and I will be able to leave this damned banana-leaf shack.