Tea, coffee and chocolate are about so much more than food and drink, according to three local authors.

For them, tea, coffee and chocolate are natural forces that pull people together.

For Priscilla Simmons of Ephrata, high tea bonded her with her great-aunt.

For Patricia Johnson of New Holland, chocolate helped her and her children recover together after her husband died.

For Connie Pombo of Elizabethtown, coffee was the tool a "guardian angel" used to save her life.

All three wrote about their experiences in the newly released Chicken Soup for the Soul Delectable Series. The four-book series features stories about tea, coffee, chocolate and wine.

As in other Chicken Soup books, the stories are intended to be inspirational, making you "feel better" when you are done reading.

As a child, Simmons developed a great affection and respect for her Aunt Gertrude by having high tea with her each year. Her great-aunt, who became a chemist in 1920, was also a world traveler and a single woman who expected respect and manners.

High tea with Aunt Gertrude was more than drinking tea and eating pastries, it was a formal event with predictable pageantry.

Every time Simmons traveled with her mother and sisters to New Jersey see Aunt Gertrude in "the city," Simmons knew what to expect: Aunt Gertrude, bejeweled and dressed to the nines, standing erect, with her hair in a salt-and-pepper bun and a twinkle in her eye.

She would serve them tea on a lace tablecloth with fresh flowers, silverware and china cups she had collected from around the world.

During the formal tea, Aunt Gertrude would tell Simmons about the places their teacups had come from. After tea was over, the family would head into the city to see the sights.

The closeness lasted right up until Aunt Gertrude's death. Simmons uses the same teapot and some of Aunt Gertrude's tea cups today with her grandchildren, passing down the tradition and the stories.

Johnson's story is one she wishes she didn't have to tell. Her husband died when her children were young.

They were left with little money and more than enough grief to go around. The one treat they allowed themselves was window shopping at the mall Friday nights.

On a particularly sad night, they would go to the gourmet chocolate counter at a major department store, and each would choose a piece of gourmet chocolate.

"It always put us in a better mood, and as I discovered recently, I was making good memories for my children," Johnson, who prefers rich, dark chocolate, wrote.

Her love of chocolate goes back to fifth-grade field trips, Johnson said, when she would go to the actual Hershey's chocolate factory and look at chocolate mixing in gargantuan vats.

Now that her children are grown, she still needs one or two pieces of chocolate a day, she said.

"It's not quite a comfort food; it's a de-stressor," she said. She likes to eat her Hershey's Special Dark chocolate miniature in nibbles, with tea or with wine, preferably a Shiraz.

Coffee is the beverage of choice for Connie Pombo of Elizabethtown, ever since she and her husband lived in Sicily. Coffee is comforting, she said, because it reminds her of the good times she had there.

Italian coffee is an art form, Pombo said, and a connection to everyone else who drinks coffee.

The espresso bar — "that's where life takes place," Pombo said. People stand at the bar and "talk to the guy on the right and the guy on the left."

Pombo wasn't looking for conversation or comfort, though, on the morning she wrote about in her story, "Touched by a Coffee-loving Angel." She just wanted her morning jolt of hazelnut coffee — now — because she was running late.

Her unappreciated demand led to conversation with the clerk, which ultimately led to, believe it or not, mammograms.

When the clerk discovered that Pombo was putting off a mammogram, even though Pombo's mother had breast cancer five years before, the clerk refused to give Pombo her coffee.

"You're not getting this until you get a mammogram, and that's final!" the clerk said, according to Pombo's story.

Grouchy and miffed all day without her coffee, Pombo couldn't stop thinking about what the woman said. That night she did a self breast exam and found a lump — about the size of a coffee bean.

One thing led to another and sure enough, Pombo found out she did have breast cancer and needed surgery to remove it.

Three months after her surgery, Pombo returned to the coffee shop to thank the woman who had withheld her coffee.

"Do you remember me?" Pombo asked the woman.

"Oh yes! Did you get your mammogram?" the clerk asked.

"Yes, I did," Pombo answered. "In fact, I think you saved my life!"

Ten years later, Pombo said, she's learned a lot from that experience, which all started with coffee.

"I believe God puts in our path people to alert us to things we need to pay attention to."

She's also developed a sense of gratitude for the life she doesn't think she would have had if the clerk hadn't withheld her coffee.

"It's like an awakening — everything comes into sharp focus. The air is clearer, the sky is bluer." She never misses a sunset.

"I almost feel sorry for those people who haven't had tragedy," Pombo said.

"I love life," she said. "I could never say that before."

E-mail: lespenshade@lnpnews.com