The Scent of Apple Tea

1. Kathryn

Kathryn

1

Before Kathryn grew herbs in the Willamette Valley, when she still had red hair and courage—without being in any other way remarkable—she unintentionally communicated with a dead Scottish ancestor. Flora started appearing in the silent realm where dreams come from when Kathryn was a young mother, forty years ago.

All her adult life Kathryn had been afraid of dying alone, though she didn’t know it. She didn’t know the phobia was trapped inside her heart, behind the wall of the pericardium, stuffed inside the vessels and capillaries, hidden.

She’d carried the fear for years. For Flora. Mentally aching and bleeding from a memory that wasn’t even hers. Kathryn wondered how her life would’ve been different if she hadn’t suffered that dormant fear by proxy, what decisions she might’ve made without the terror shackling her ankles.

Perhaps she wouldn’t have fought with her daughter as much. Maybe she would’ve encouraged Heather more when they’d had the time, instead of holding her close at home—so certain that if Heather had left, the terrifying sorrow and blankness of being alone, old, and useless would bleed into her lungs so that when she died in fearful paralysis, it would be as if being buried alive.