Some people are addicted to drugs. My family is addicted to tea.

I think it’s hereditary. One of my ancestors put leaves in a cup of boiling water, tasted it, and found it good.

Other people might think tea is terrible, and they have the right to be wrong. In my family, it’s the drink that cures all illnesses, aches, and pains, and is worth its weight in gold.

We’re not rich enough to get the good stuff, which is why I have to settle for herbal teas most of the time. Fortunately, we’re not so poor as to stoop to drinking Lipton, except in emergencies.

This addiction to tea is why there was a crisis when our tea kettle started flaking.

The above is an unusual sentence, so let me explain what happened.

Our kettle was a good kettle. It was a noble kettle. It did its job faithfully and well. We loved it like a child—okay, maybe that’s going too far.

But as this kettle got hot—as kettles often do—it started to develop a ring of charred-looking metal on the inside, at the bottom of the kettle.

Us Paskhavers are never ones to judge a pot by its cover, or something. We never call a kettle black when really it was more of an off-gray.

But the gray bits started flaking off the bottom and ending up in our tea. That was where our family had to put down the collective foot.

The issue was dire. We had no other kettle. But to continue to drink from this one, which was sending flakes of unknown metals into our cups, was probably to risk ingesting carcinogens, or something.

Seeing as none of us had developed superhuman powers, we knew the tea made from this kettle was not good.

So we ordered a new kettle, set to arrive in a week. And boy, was that week agony.

No hot drinks. Not a single sip of tea for seven whole days. We were nearly at each other’s throats.

At last the new kettle arrived. We set it to boil and waited patiently for 1.8 liters of water to start bubbling.

And we waited. And we waited. And we waited.

They say a watched pot never boils, but I swear that even when we looked away, this kettle didn’t do jack.

I wish I could say the issue was that we forgot to plug it in, but alas, it was plugged in as many kettles have been plugged in before. It just wasn’t heating. It was broken.

I debated heating up a cup of Lipton in the microwave, but even the thought made me gag.

Another kettle was sent for. Another week of agony was endured.

At last, I held a cup of boiling leaf-water in my hands. I took a sip, and all the worries of the past two weeks melted away like metal melts at the bottom of an old tea kettle.

So the story had a happy ending.

We threw out the old kettle and the new kettle that didn’t work, and got to drink tea from a kettle that did work and that didn’t leave mysterious flakes of who-knows-what in our tea.

Peace was restored. Goodwill shone throughout the neighborhood. The peoples of the world joined hands and—okay, that’s definitely going too far.

But there was joy at home and peace toward each other. And that was what mattered most.

Even when I ran out of herbal tea and was forced to resort temporarily to Lipton, all was well.

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Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.