The Last (and First) Cup of Tea

I had never seen so many flowers.

They hung from the wisteria tree overhead, and glowed like white lanterns from the blossoming magnolia tree. I breathed deep, amazed at the smell; I’d never seen a real magnolia tree. The closest I’d been was under the closed lid of a scented candle. I’d been a city girl all my long life, and even as I grew older and slower and the clock grew short, I never did buy my cottage in upstate.

Ivy climbed hedge walls and barely-glimpsed trellises. Sunflowers stood well over my head and tracked the distant sun through the tree branches. Hydrangeas and bleeding hearts and foxglove stood in waist-high stands, not seeming to care about season or soil or light, as if conditions were perfect and there was plenty enough room.

Maybe there was for a flower. For a human, I wasn’t so sure. This garden only seemed to circle about a hundred square foot area, always turning back to this central courtyard. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be here.

In the courtyard there was a glass-topped garden table. Just the kind, truth be told, that I would have liked for my little upstate cottage that I’d never reached. Green-painted wrought iron, bright sunny-patterned cushions. It sat out under the purple tresses of the wisteria tree, catching stray petals.

On the table was a steaming tea service—complete in lovely hand-painted porcelain—and in one chair sat a pleasantly-smiling woman who looked only a little younger than myself. Her face was dough-soft and fine-lined, hair steel gray and topped with a jaunty little straw hat. Her clothes looked like she herself had been tending this garden: dirty jean capris and a plain blue shirt. Nothing fancy and nothing to apologize for.

She had a feeling about her of patience. Of invitation. I hadn’t taken it yet because I didn’t remember coming to this garden. I didn’t know how I got there; I simply became conscious that I was wandering through the flowers. The last thing I remember is the big hospital downtown after a terrifying night of weakness and confusion. And in my heart, I knew where I was.

Watching my feet, I picked my way through a crowded neighborhood of creeping strawberry plants. I felt too good, too strong. I felt twenty—no thirty—years younger, and my wrinkled hands were nearly as wrinkled as they should be. I suppose I was looking for an exit, all the while not really expecting to find one.

Sure enough, I came around to my friend and the tea tray under the wisteria.

Fear whistled up my spine, despite the warmth of this spring-turning-summer dreamland. My feet began to root, and I felt like I was going to sink into the earth right there, too afraid to come or go.

Before I could calcify, I took a huff of a breath and stomped through the clearest path right up to the table. The woman smiled up at me, her green eyes crinkling.

“Am I dead?” I demanded.

“Why, yes. Tea?”

We looked at each other. The wind puffed out of my sails and I dropped into the chair next to hers. She picked up the teapot carefully and set on pouring me a cup.

“It took me a long time to be sure,” she told me. “I didn’t know the name, but this kind smelled right. Here. Try it and see.”

Disoriented, I accepted the delicate hand-painted cup and took a sip. “It’s… lavender earl gray.”

“Is it the right one?”

“The right… one?”

“I had to decide by smell, and this one seemed right. This is the kind you drink, isn’t it?”

I had a few favorites. Everybody’s taste changes over time. But lavender earl gray was a flavor I always swung back to when the oranges and the chamomiles and the green teas got stale. “Yes. Thank you. How did you know? Are you… my angel? I mean… like my guardian angel? Or a spirit guide?”

The woman laughed and clapped her hands. “You could say that. I did my best to watch over you for a long time. Are you saying that you don’t recognize me?”

Now that she mentioned it, she seemed familiar, but I could have met this woman anywhere. At the senior center. At the grocery store. Maybe I had run into her at the rehab center when I had to have my other hip replaced last year. I took another sip of tea and examined her face. She watched me impishly, obviously enjoying my confusion.

“So they send an old lady to greet an old lady?”

She giggled, girlish and light. I twisted my lips; I’d been around too long to be the butt of anyone’s joke.

“Why don’t you just tell me so we can move this along?”

She gave me an affectionate purse of the lips. It couldn’t hide the fact that she was still grinning at me.

“Now I know why I was the best one to meet you.”

I scoffed. “It could have been my mother, or my daughter. My husband, even—if I made it, I know he did. Why not someone I know?”

“But you do know me.”

“From where?”

She folded her hands, unbothered. “You were the one who told me we would meet again.”

“Again?” I looked at her eyes. They certainly did seem familiar.

She reached out and covered my hand with hers. “You were with me at the end. I was scared and I hurt. I didn’t understand then. But you were with me. You told me you loved me, and that you’d see me again someday.”

I froze.

She smiled, seeing the recognition on my face.

And then in her place, a glossy tabby cat was perched with her front feet on the table. She nosed her face into my hand, just as she had done decades ago. I stroked her numbly, automatically; my body remembered, even if I no longer had a body, the force of comforting habit strong enough to endure decades of life and even further.

She gave a spry leap into my lap, purring. I sat there, scratching her ears just as I had used to do. I couldn’t speak; my vision blurred with hot tears.

You said you’d see me again, and you were right, she purred. She looked up at me with her brilliant green cat eyes, then propped her front paws on my chest to bunt her forehead into my chin. Welcome home.