For the past few weeks we have been receiving mail (mostly junk, in my opinion) for the previous tenant of our apartment. We just moved here last Summer. We had gotten mail for other people at this address before, but this particular person was literally being flooded with all kinds of letters from Australia. One snowy day I ran into our neighbour next door and bluntly asked him, if he knew the previous tenant's whereabouts. I wasn't really expecting any leads, but very much to my surprise, he did point to a building across the park and said:"She lives in that nursing home overthere now."....
It wasn't until the mail for her kept piling up, that I finally decided to make the trip across the park and try my luck to find her. After all, this is a nursing home we're talking about. Did she still live there? Was she still alive at all?

And so I went - today.
You see, I don't like nursing homes that much. They make me sad.

The receptionist couldn't find Mrs.M on her directory list. She kept looking and looking, flipping the few pages back and forth. I was already giving up, when out of nowhere a nurse interjected. She knew Mrs.M and a few minutes later an old lady with a walker came slowly down the hallway to meet me. She was somewhat frail. I never thought it'd be difficult to introduce myself to a complete stranger with noticeable hearing loss, but I finally managed to build a raport with her. After a few words I noticed her accent, which I know too well. German? Really??? What are the odds?
She was a bit baffled at first and couldn't make any sense of this stranger asking questions about her previous apartment across the park. But the longer we talked, the more she was delighted to have a visitor speaking in German to her, bringing her the mail and giving her an update about her old house. Turns out, she actually used to own this house. She worked here as a seamstress in a factory, in order to save up for this house. Her son, who lives in Germany, visited her only on a few occasions here in Toronto and insisted on her selling the house and moving to a nursing home, when she couldn't be left on her own anymore. (She begs to differ on this one - she was just fine by herself)
We chatted for another little while and it gave me heavy boots. Why was this 87 year old, frail woman here by herself, without any family members around her? Why wouldn't her son fly her back to Germany, when she actually wouldn't mind getting out of that facility in the first place?
I have a feeling that I will find out soon.
I promised to bring her the mail regularly and she promised to come for a visit when the weather gets warmer. As she put it with a sheepish smile on her face:"I know where you live, after all."