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Home from a night shift. Genmaicha, the kind with toasted rice. Nothing magical about it except that I'm actually tasting it.

Every so often someone at the mosque teases me and asks me to interpret their dream. My name is Yusuf, after the prophet who read the king's dreams, so I suppose it's fair. I am very bad at it. I mostly just make tea. But I'll share one of mine. We're taught to tell a good dream only to people who love you, and this place has started to feel like that. My grandfather, who died when I was nineteen, was pouring tea in a garden I've never seen. Tulips everywhere, which he never grew. He handed me the glass by the rim, the way he always did so I wouldn't burn my fingers, and said nothing at all. I woke with the smell of bergamot in the room. I don't need it to mean more than that. He was well, and he was still looking after my fingers.

First properly cold morning, so the trà gừng is back. My mother's way: a thumb of fresh ginger sliced thin, simmered ten minutes, then honey and a squeeze of lemon once it's off the stove. It goes into the big thermos for the school pickup line, where I wait with both hands wrapped around the cup. While it simmers I recite Nam mô A Di Đà Phật on my mala, ten recitations for every slice of ginger. By the time the tea is ready, so is the busy part of my head. The twins say the car smells like Bà Ngoại's house. That's the highest praise they have.

Taught my granddaughter Lily to read tea leaves Sunday afternoon. Loose black tea with a pinch of dried chamomile from the garden, wide white cups, no strainer. Drink it down to a spoonful, swirl three times toward you with your left hand, turn it over onto the saucer, count to seven. Her cup had a very clear bird near the rim, which in my mother's book means news on its way, and soon. Mine had what I generously called a lantern and Lily called 'a trash can.' An hour later her best friend phoned to say she's moving back from Ohio. Lily now considers me a professional. I am not correcting her.

The çaydanlık never rests

People ask why I always have tea on. The answer is a stacked Turkish teapot, the çaydanlık: water boils in the bottom pot while strong black tea steeps slowly in the top. You pour a little of the dark tea into a tulip glass, then cut it with hot water until it's the color the guest wants. Rabbit's blood, my grandmother called the perfect shade. Deep red, and you can see through it. In my family we say a guest is God's guest. So the tea is never really for me. It's for whoever might knock. Brewing it is a small dhikr: the kettle hums, I remember, I wait. Come by. There are sugar cubes, and I'll pretend not to count how many you take.

Turkish tea takes about fifteen minutes in the çaydanlık: water boiling below, leaves steeping above. For years I scrolled through those fifteen minutes. Now they belong to dhikr. La ilaha illallah, on the out-breath and the in-breath, while the steam rises. Nothing dramatic happens. No visions, no whirling. Just the kettle, the window going dark over the Chicago rooftops, and the slow return of the heart to where it was always meant to face. The masters say remembrance polishes the mirror of the heart. Mine has a lot of fingerprints. Fifteen minutes at a time, then. Tea's ready. Come sit.

Electric kettle apothecary

Dorm potion setup: one electric kettle, one mason jar, one botany textbook. Tonight's blend is Mentha × piperita (peppermint), Melissa officinalis (lemon balm) and a few dried Rosa petals, steeped five minutes with the lid on so the volatile oils stay in the cup. I know exactly what every plant in my mug is, down to the genus, and that's the whole point. My first year I bought a "witch tea" online with mystery ingredients and I am still mad about it. Learn your plants, friends. Latin names are a love language.