500 Tenants? Really?

The first building, purchased for a song in 1984, had three apartments and I lived in one, so there weren’t many tenants at first. But over time a couple other buildings were bought and sold and tenants came and went. Some stayed for more than a decade, but most moved on with their lives after a year or so.

Saturday at a writers conference I think I saw one of my former tenants. I remembered how she (if, indeed, this was my former tenant) had lugged all that heavy furniture up all those stairs to the third floor and hung Laura Ashley curtains on the little French windows and found romance on a hiking trip. She was an English professor and her new boyfriend could barely read. Also, he was twelve years younger, so I didn’t have much hope for the relationship. Still they got married and now here she was—if this woman was her—with lines around her eyes and a touch a gray in her dark hair, but smiling.  

I should approach her, I thought. After all, we lived under the same roof for nearly two years. “Are you still teaching?” I could ask. “Do you still write stories for that literary magazine?”

But who was I but a blip in her past, a stopping place between divorce and remarriage? A landlady is like a one-night stand, not someone anyone would want to meet at a writers conference twenty years later. 

Trying to remember her name, I watched her vanish into the crowd.