A friend from back home has mentioned to me that there are some people in the world that you simply cannot connect with. This isn't necessarily because you dislike them or because you don't try, it's simply a fact of life that you will one day meet someone you just cannot comprehend as a human being. For her, it was a professor. For me, it is our landlady.
Our landlady, though a perfectly pleasant lady, is into a variant of scientology and (possibly consequently) is someone that I am just incapable of holding a conversation with. All of our efforts end in prolonged moments of tea sipping and hmm-ing. Our relationship is certainly not helped by the fact that she is a rather mediocre landlady with a slight passive aggressive and entitled bent.
I've been trying to avoid negativity, but recently she's been really pushing the envelope on my tolerance. She called us up recently to announce that she'll be renting out the house in December and that we can't live here if people are renting the house. But don't worry about the fact that we would be flatless for three weeks! -- "You may have to find a place to stay for a little while. Oh, certainly not a month. Just a few weeks." -- Thanks, landlady.
It hasn't really helped that a few days ago, she arrived with her partner and her partner's Sicilian parents, and they have been spending the past few days doing renovations that she really should have taken care of much earlier. The nonexistent cat door now exists and no longer blows cold wind into our already cold room; there's some insulation lining the door; and the window in our room can now close. While I appreciate the changes, the fact that we won't be around to appreciate them dampened my enthusiasm quite a bit.
Anyhow, today we ended up in the kitchen with our landlady's partner's Sicilian mother and spent a surprising and eminently enjoyable few hours talking with her. She didn't speak any English and neither of us speak Italian, but it turns out that we all speak food. Armed with high school Spanish (me), French (Claire), Italian (her) and elaborate charades (all of us), we managed to discuss recipes and get into our family history and how we ended up in this house on this day. She was an adorable little lady with beautiful earrings and an amazing smile, and for a few brief hours, I completely forgot about the banging and crashing and chopping going on in the house. Instead of thinking about the DIY construction or our future homelessness or the fact that my siblings are coming soon, I was completely in the moment, thumbing through her tiny English-Italian dictionary and giving up searching for words in lieu of increasingly absurd gestures.
It was such a lovely surprise. All of the recent negativity to do with our landlady has been getting me a bit stressed, and it was just good to take a break and re-realize that the world is full of beautiful people.
Construction goes on as planned, though. Ick.
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