There was an old woman on my neighborhood who had no where to go and no food. She didn’t get any help. For four years, I brought her food every day. People who lived next door would look at me. She died yesterday. I froze when I got a call from a number I didn’t know. I never would have known who this old woman was.
I first saw her in the winter of 2021. I had just moved to a quiet cul-de-sac in a small town outside of Portland. I rented a little one-bedroom apartment to start over after my divorce. Most of the time, people here stayed to themselves. You waved, they nodded, and that was all.
But I usually saw her as I walked by this old house that was crumbling down. Small, hunched over, and usually wearing a thin shawl, even in the summer. She would sometimes sit on the porch and stare off into space. She wasn’t there at all at times.
It seemed like nobody saw her. Like she wasn’t there.
One afternoon, I brought her a bag of groceries. I had some extra stuff, like eggs, bananas, and grilled chicken. When I offered it to her, she blinked at me like I had given her a bar of gold.
She said that her name was Mrs. Genara. That’s all. No first name. I asked her if she needed anything else. She shook her head, but she hugged the bag close to her chest, as if it were very important.
That was our thing.
After work, I would bring her something every day. There are times when things are left over. I sometimes get soup from the Filipino deli next to my work. She never asked for anything specific. She never let me in. We talked on the porch all the time.
She would tell me little things, like how her knees hurt more when it rained, how she used to love music, and how she had traveled to Spain but couldn’t remember when. Her memory seemed to flow, as if she were used to strolling through fog.
The people next door thought I was weird.
As I walked back to my car, I could hear people talking behind my back. “Is she his cousin?” “What does he get out of it?” “That house is not safe.”
Nobody else went to her residence. I saw the HOA guy take pictures of her yard and then leave without saying anything.
I asked a few other people, but they didn’t really know who she was either. She had lived there “forever,” her husband had died “ages ago,” and she “wasn’t all there anymore.” People thought she was a lost cause.
But I went there every day for four years.
Even when I was having money problems, I kept going. I stayed there even after I found out I had COVID. My car broke down, so I had to walk three blocks with heated soup containers wrapped in towels. I don’t know. It just felt right.
There was an ambulance parked in front of her house when I arrived there yesterday morning.
A young paramedic came down the stairs. I stopped moving. He shook his head and glanced at me.
She had died while she was sleeping.
I held the soup in my hand and couldn’t do anything. I don’t know how long I stayed there, but I finally left the container on the porch and went home.
I got a call that night from a number I didn’t know.
The voice on the other end was clear and sounded like a professional. He said he was a lawyer and needed to talk to me about the money Mrs. L. Genara left behind.
I informed him he had the wrong guy. I lived next to her. I never even went inside her house.
He said no, but I was the proper person to talk to.
The world altered at that point.
People found out that Mrs. Genara wasn’t poor at all.
She didn’t live on the street. She wasn’t broke. People remembered her.
She used to be a pianist who went on tour throughout Europe and Asia under a different name. She was a kid prodigy in the 1960s. Her husband, who was an artist, showed his work in modest museums. They had built a quiet fortune together—nothing flashy, but powerful.
When he died, she had drawn back. No children. There aren’t any family members around. Just the home, the paintings, and the memories. Dementia started slowly, but suddenly it hit all at once. And when she stopped reading her mail or checking her account, no one came to get her.
Not me.
The lawyer told me she had been watching me for years. Writing small comments about me in her journals. There were days when Mom didn’t remember my name. Some days, she called me “the kind one.” But I was always there, and that meant a lot.
She gave me her home.
She gave me more than simply the home. She gave me the whole land as a gift. The music she has. A handful of the paintings her husband did. He read a letter that was written by hand to me out loud, and his voice shook a little at the end.
The letter said:
“To the person who remembered I was there—you gave me back my dignity without asking for anything in return.”
The only thing I can do in this world is say thank you in the greatest way I can.
Please look for yourself. This area should make you remember that kindness is more powerful than silence.
I felt completely broken while I was in that lawyer’s office.
I hadn’t done anything strange. I had just made sure she wasn’t hungry. I talked to her. Made her feel special.
I didn’t sure what to do with the house at first. It needs a lot of improvement. The ceiling was sagging, the pipes were old, and the floor creaked in a way that made me feel insecure. Part of me wanted to sell it, receive the cash, and start over.
But then I did it. There were parts of her past in every room. A lot of music on sheets. Scarves that are old. Pictures of cities she could barely remember seeing. I saw a framed newspaper story on how she did at the Teatro Real in Madrid. She was 19 years old.
I couldn’t let it go.
So I started cleaning it up.
The money she left in another account wasn’t much, but it was enough for repairs. I didn’t touch the art or the recordings. I left the living room just the way she liked it. I even kept the wind chimes on the porch, even though they didn’t make any noise.
People in the area heard about it.
People who used to not care about things now wanted to know more.
“Did she really give you all that?”
“Are you living there now?”
“What are you going to do with the house?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I told them I still didn’t get it.
About six months after she died, I put up a sign on the porch that said:
FREE COFFEE AND PIANO TIME FOR EVERYONE IN THE FAMILY
That first Saturday, three kids came.
Then an old man said he hadn’t played since college. A woman who used to teach music cried as she played the keys again. People brought food that had been baked. Someone brought us a bunch of books.
There are people coming and going every Saturday now. They talk, play, and listen. Some others just sit on the porch with a cup of coffee and let the chimes catch any passing breeze.
The piano is the most important thing in Mrs. Genara’s house.
I never told anyone. I never put anything on the internet. Still, people continued coming. People might be talking about it. Or something else.
One day, a woman named Araceli came by. Araceli is in her thirties and has curly hair. She has a lot of questions. She added that in the 1970s, her dad used to play with Genara at a jazz club in the middle of the city. She showed me a picture from a long time ago of the two of them sitting on a piano bench and smiling.
She stated she would help me store some of the recordings and music sheets safely. We ended up going through boxes for hours. Talking. Laughing. Once in a while, we cry.
We’ve been dating ever since.
Life is funny.
For all those years, I thought I was doing something good for her. I thought I was the one who gave and helped. But I was the one who was saved.
She gave me a cause to stay alive. A second chance. A place to call home.
And somehow, she broke through the wall I had erected around myself since the divorce. For a long time, I thought I had nothing to give anyone. But that old woman helped me know that just being present may change everything.
Don’t wait for someone to tell you to care if you notice someone who has been ignored, forgotten, or left behind.
Just do it.
You don’t know who they were before.
You don’t know who they are now.
Years later, you can find yourself on a porch with a full heart, wondering how you ever lived without them.
