Living Abroad :: The woman above.

We used to live under the floor of the woman above. She was a rambunctious lady with a fierce personality.

Often we heard her through our ceiling rebuking some poor soul on the telephone for an apparently obvious errant act of service towards her.

We lived in a ‘garden flat’, basically the cellar converted to an apartment, in which we had use of the garden, but which was overlooked by the woman upstairs. Like the scene in Schindler’s List where Amon Goeth sat, shirtless taking pot shots at the helpless prisoners below, we never used the garden for fear of verbal retribution of some sort.

We could see the sky if we pushed our noses up to the window and looked up. At the time we never knew how crushing this was on us and it’s only since we left that London apartment and came away that we felt lighter. We could not only see the sky, we could see the sea, and the horizon. It brought a great lightness of being that is palpable.

Wherever we go next on our journey, I’ll always remember our beautiful apartment here, listening to the cacophony of birds at the onset of dusk or sitting on the sofa and looking at the sunset over the tops of the masts as they sway, nodding in silent agreement, at the solemnity of the days end.

Have a lovely weekend.

See you on Monday.