WASHINGTON -- A beautiful Japanese tea room emerges as one enters and goes down the hall in Katherine Lyons' and Austin Babcock's spacious brick house. In this quiet neighborhood in suburban D.C., Lyons, or Soshu, her tea name, teaches the Urasenke tradition of chanoyu. The house has been Urasenke's D.C. branch since 1998.
Lyons, 31, has been practicing tea for nine years, not particularly long in the world of tea, but she and her husband went through about five years of an intensive program at Kyoto's Urasenke headquarters, designed specially for non-Japanese. They were sent to the D.C. chapter in 1996, which was then in a different location.
Lyons' first tea experience was when she was still in college. She happened to attend one of the tea classes that her Japanese mother was taking in those days, and instantly fell in love with the peaceful atmosphere, she says.