The other day, I talked to my landlady. The heater in our bedroom had been moody for the past couple of weeks, sometimes turning on, sometimes staying cold. No fun in this winter (we are in our third month of snow and ice). We held off with the call to the landlady until we really couldn’t fix it ourselves anymore, being all nice and trying to live up to “being the best tenants she’d ever had,” as she’d once told us.

When I finally called her to tell her about the heater, however, all she said was that this was going to be on our expense. I responded that I knew it was in fact her job as a landlady to fix the heating on her expense. She became all snappy, we hung up, and I turned to my husband.

“I can’t believe she just said that,” I said to him. “We try everything to make as little trouble as possible, even though this place needs fixing in so many places, and all she does is tell us we have to pay for it ourselves.”

I got all worked up about her not acknowledging our niceness, about her turning what had been her “best tenants ever“ into just another bunch of stupid idiots in only one second.

Then I took a deep breath. And I remembered a story my hubs had told me a couple of days earlier. He had talked to our landlady, and she had been all shaken up because one of her son’s friends had been found dead on the street, frozen to death. Her younger son apparently had lived with the guy, an alcohol addict, and his sister for a while. They had tried to help the brother, had offered him free lodging and assistance in becoming dry, but he’d rejected all of it, until one day he didn’t come back home anymore. He had lived on the street when this hard, hard winter hit. He was found only two streets away.

After another deep breath, I did the only thing I could think of: I called my landlady again, and apologized. We spoke about the tragic death, she began to cry, told me she had helped the sister choose a suit for her brother to wear in the coffin, and that she had given her money to transfer him back home to Poland. We talked about how close real poverty is to us, although we mostly choose to ignore it.

It was cleansing, like a deep breath. When we hung up, we both were happier than before.

One Response to “Breathing always helps”

1. Laura W. Says:
   March 5th, 2010 at 9:58 am

   *tear*

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