Before I made hibiscus-mint tea, I made Angry Eggs. I was angry because I had COVID and had been up since dawn, uncomfortable in my aching body, and very hungry.

I had made tea, meditated, read, tried to go back to sleep, and finally got up and made myself breakfast, masked, in the empty kitchen. My husband came down while I was cooking. “I made coffee!” I said. He was not pleased. “If you went to a restaurant and you knew the chef had COVID, even if they were masked, would you want to eat there?” he asked. Our normally placid relationship exploded in a rare fight, and the poor eggs I was making suffered. Undersalted, veggies burnt. I drank the entire pot of coffee by myself, in isolation on the back porch, and ate my angry feelings.

I realized soon after that this meal was the last one that I could even partially taste or smell for the duration of my illness and a while after. Exiled from the kitchen, divorced from my senses (though thankfully not my husband), I had a profoundly disorienting thought. If who I thought myself to be – someone whose soul comes alive in the kitchen, but whose tongue now had no more taste perception than her big toe – was no longer accessible, at least temporarily, was I still me? I could sense the sting of basil, the acid of a blackberry, the pure chemical sweetness of granola, but nuance and depth of flavor was lost to me. Even the sensation of hunger was abstract – I’m chewing food but I can’t taste it. Am I still hungry for it? What are the more subtle signs of satiation in my body? How are these physical sensations related to the energetic life of the food? In this moment, I was something like a witness, watching myself have these experiences and ask these questions.

I was also extremely hot. The fever in my body mirrored the heatwave outside my body, relentless in its length and intensity. I sought cooling remedies, even if I couldn’t taste them. Watermelon. More watermelon. Mint grew in the garden I shared with my neighbor Genevieve, and as soon as I was well enough to leave the house, I walked there to pick some and water the thirsty plants. On the way home, I passed bush after bush of hibiscus – not the bright red ones I knew from Hawai’i, but common hibiscus, hibiscus syriacus, also known of Rose of Sharon (like the Grapes of Wrath!), originating on the Korean peninsula. I knew hibiscus was cooling, but I had never cooked with it before. I picked some. Hibiscus is a whole genus of plants in the Malvaceae or mallow family; the type commonly used in tea is hibiscus sabdariffa, indigenous to Africa, also known as sorrel or jamaica, dark red and extremely tart. My syriacus flowers were edible but neither red nor tart; it didn’t matter since I couldn’t taste them anyway. I washed the herbs and flowers I had just picked, boiled some water, and poured it over them to steep, their oils absorbing into the tea, a type of tisane, really.

I drank the infusion warm, tepid, and chilled, not tasting it but imagining its essence soothing my body’s inflammation, restoring me to what I knew of myself. When I fully recovered, I went to our local coffee shop, The Good Witch, and drank their hibiscus iced tea, staring at the Hudson and the city beyond it. I found some sabdariffa flowers at an organic market nearby, and remade my hibiscus-mint infusion, this one bracingly tart. I took some to my friend Sandra’s house to play hooky with her one afternoon, spiking the tea with gin, honey, and lime, celebrating health and friendship and a leisurely afternoon. More fun than COVID by a long shot.

The experience of this aspect of COVID, for me, was a disorienting but wise teacher. Just as I had gone through an exercise months before to describe who I am after leaving my job, I was now asking myself to let that description go too. I was not the scent of the mint or the sour of the hibiscus, but something deeper, the energy within them, a vibration, a consciousness, whole within itself and part of a much larger ecosystem of viruses and plants and cafes and markets and cocktails and friends.