I was raised on sugar water.
A family of Pepsi drinkers.
Kool‑Aid by the gallon for the kids.
By the time I could choose my own drink,
it was Mountain Dew — the brightest, loudest sugar of them all.
I drank it for decades.
Long enough to lose my teeth and have them replaced.
Long enough to watch it braid itself
with every other habit that kept me going —
cigarettes first, then vaping.
I could see the prison.
I didn’t know how I’d escape it,
but I always knew I would.
The beast demands a lot if you really want to let it go.
It isn’t a question of willpower;
it’s a question of signal.
You have to strip down to the point where the next move is clean.
I’ve reached that point before —
cold‑turkey opioids in an RV,
clonazepam on a Nevada mountain —
but never with the sugar water.
Until now.
Tonight, in my small mobile kitchen,
I steeped a bag of “leafwater.”
Kombucha tea from a food‑pantry sampler.
I added lime. A teaspoon of sugar.
And I didn’t hate it.
In fact, I was curious.
A little more open.
Maybe these Britons had a secret.
One we rejected in this country
when we swapped quiet rituals for industrial sugar.
Maybe a practice as simple as drinking “tree water”
can undo decades of conditioning.
I’m not making a vow.
I’m marking a moment.
A small signal shift.
A first experiment in a new orientation.
The art of drinking tree water.