Why I Save Dried Tea Bags for No Reason

I have a jar on the second shelf of the kitchen, to the right of the sugar and left of the Timor coffee. It is a squat glass jar with a screw lid, the kind that spends its early life holding mayonnaise or home-made jam, and in its later life it holds used tea bags. I don't remember the first one going in. Nobody asked me to start. I simply kept folding the bag over its string and dropping it in, the way you'd drop a coin into a wishing well and walk away without checking.

What I notice, doing this for years now, is that the bags stop smelling like tea after a while. What lingers is something drier, dustier — a ghost of bergamot, a faint whiff of peppermint, the shadow of a lemon that never existed as fruit. Open the jar and the whole room leans back a few years.

Australians are, on the whole, tidy people with strong opinions about bins. We have the red lid for general waste, the yellow lid for bottles and cans, the green organics bin that takes garden clippings and, in some councils, food scraps. The rules get posted on the fridge and enforced with a seriousness that would surprise visitors. Tea bags, the council material says, are not recyclable and must go in the red lid. So there is a rule about where my tea bags belong, and there is my jar, and the two have never met in the same room.

That's the contradiction I keep circling, and this blog is where I circle things until they give. I've been collecting other people's versions of the same strange habit, and I suspect some of you have one — the drawer full of rubber bands, the Tupperware with no matching lid, the camera roll of photos of nothing in particular. If you do, you might recognise your own rituals in other personal essays here, which is where I keep the personal stuff that hasn't yet decided what it is.

The Jar Beside the Kettle

The first bag in the jar came from an English Breakfast I bought at Woolworths on a Tuesday, probably during a specials run when the own-brand box was marked down to a couple of dollars. I folded the string flat across the top, pressed it closed with my thumbnail, and dropped it in. The sound it made was dull and unsatisfying, nothing like the bright little clink of a coin. By the time the jar was half full, it had developed its own weather system: some bags had gone soft and damp through the humid months, some had dried to the colour of old paper.

I keep folding them the same way. String in, bag closed, stamp facing out. Every so often I tip the whole jar onto the bench and sort through it, and there is no point to the sorting, which is probably why I enjoy it. My husband has walked in more than once, looked at the pile, and said, in the flattened, unsurprised tone of a man who has lived in Australia his whole life, "You're keeping those again." Which is not a question.

I have thought about why I fold them at all. Folding is the part that makes it a decision. A tea bag dropped in crumpled is rubbish. A tea bag dropped in folded is a small paper keepsake, and keepsakes want to be stacked.

Woolworths, Coles and a Box of One Hundred

Australians buy tea in bulk and treat it like a staple, because the maths says so. A box of one hundred own-brand bags from Coles will run you five or six dollars, and a decent one from T2 or a specialist tea shop in the city will set you back fifteen or more for the same count. Long before I started the jar, my mother kept a reserve box in the pantry and pretended it was for emergencies. In our house, "emergency" meant visitors and bad news.

The supermarket shelf is where the habit actually begins, though. You stand in the tea aisle at Woolworths, or Coles, or even the IGA at the back of the shop in a small town, and you pick up a box and feel the weight of it in your hand and think about how long a hundred bags will last. Long. Longer than you need. People do this with tea the way they do with toilet paper — they buy as if the world is about to end politely.

There is a version of Australian thrift that looks like hoarding and calls itself sensible. Buy in bulk. Use the container. Nothing wasted. Except the tea bags themselves, which are, by the letter of the local council, waste, and which are the ones I've decided to keep. I don't buy loose from a bulk dispenser the way some do. I buy sealed boxes, because a sealed box has an expiry date, and an expiry date makes the whole thing feel like an archive.

T2 has colonised the Australian high street in a way that still surprises overseas visitors — green and white cups, a flat white, a chai latte with more milk than tea, a price that makes you sit down rather than take away. Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane: there is always one on the corner. When I want my own cuppa at home I use the cheap bags, and the jar is supposedly the archive of the expensive ones. That isn't true. The jar is the archive of whichever bag happened to be in my hand that morning, which is worse, because it means the jar is not curated at all.

What the Smell Brings Back

The smell is the part that undoes me. Not the tea itself — nobody smells a used bag and thinks of tea. What comes up is dust and something floral, and it arrives without warning, in a lift or a queue at the post office.

For me it is my grandmother's kitchen in suburban Melbourne: the good days, the blue hanky drying over the oven handle, the gas heater with its pilot light hissing. She said "cuppa" the way other people say "tea", and she said "chuck a kettle on" for what everyone else calls boiling the kettle. I inherited both phrases and use them with a fluency that occasionally makes people laugh. There is no mystery in it. Australians shortened the language on purpose, or it shortened itself, and kept "cuppa" because two syllables was plenty.

The smell is not the whole memory. The memory is standing in that kitchen not doing anything, being told to help, and choosing the tea instead of the washing up. I was about eleven. The bag went in the bin, and my grandmother looked at it and said nothing, but she looked.

That is the material. That is what the jar is made of when you strip it back.

The Uses I Do Not Have

There are uses. Everyone knows the uses. You can dry herbs in a bag, use one to polish chrome, line a drawer with the paper to catch grease. People have told me all of these, usually at a barbecue, usually holding a beer, usually with the confidence of someone who has never done it.

I have never done them. I have, once, used an empty bag to pick up the pieces of a broken mug and felt like a fraud. The jars in other people's houses are the same as mine, and that is the point: they are not for the uses. The saved bag is a receipt for a moment. Proof you were there, that the water boiled, that somebody was awake in the early hours of a Thursday and decided to make tea.

I keep the bags, I have no use for them whatsoever, and the two facts sit side by side without argument. When my sister asked what I did with them, I said "nothing" and she said "so why don't you bin them" and I said "I know", and that was the end of it.

Other People, Other Reasons

The habit seems to run in families the way money does. A reader in Darwin told me her mother kept spent bags in an old tobacco tin because her grandfather had. A man in Fremantle drops his into the compost caddy instead, which is arguably braver. Somebody in Hobart collects the ones with the little metal staple still attached, which I understand completely and have never done, because the staple turns a bag into a small sharp hazard, and I like the idea of a jar of tiny dangers.

Reading about other people's habits is how I find out mine are not as strange as they feel at half past six in the morning. I read a Swahili-language review recently that made a remark about a character who keeps objects with no practical value, and the reviewer treats this as the most revealing thing about her. She was right. Someone who hoards the useless is telling you what they were like on the day it mattered.

Turning the Habit Into a Scene

I put it into the fiction eventually, because that is where my private rituals go to become useful. The jar became a scene: a woman in a rented flat in Adelaide who folds every bag and keeps a drawer of them, and the reader understands her long before she explains it. A character cannot be told why she does something. She can only be shown doing it at the wrong moment, with the wrong light on it.

That is the trick I keep learning. The jar is not a metaphor for memory. The jar is the thing my character does, and the memory arrives on its own, later, when the bag comes out of the cupboard smelling of a Melbourne kitchen I made up entirely from a real one.

Writing about it has made the habit stranger, which is a small loss and a small gain. I still keep the bags. But now I know the reason I keep them: they are a scene waiting to be written, and if I write it badly, at least I have a jar of evidence.

If you keep something for no reason, I would like to hear the reason you have never told anyone. Send me a line in the comments, or write it properly and send it in as a story submission — I read everything that arrives, and the best ones end up on this page in one form or another.

And if you want to know who is behind all of this, the jar, the Adelaide flat, the grandmother with the hanky, there is about the writer where I explain the rest. The tea bags are still on the second shelf, the jar is still full, and I still have no reason. What I have now is better material than I had in June.