“We thought we were royalty.”

The Artist is another one of my amazing residents. She’s a pen and ink artist that does amazing work even though her hands don’t ever stop shaking because of Parkinson’s. One day I was in her room making her bed and noticed a few pictures of, what I thought was, Westminster Abbey. I asked her if she’d taken the pictures while she was in London and her answer surprised me.

“Oh that’s not Westminster Abbey, dear. Although it looks very similar in those pictures. That is the “Westminster Abbey” of the Netherlands. My cousin was the Prime Minister and I took those on one of my trips to visit him. He was a cousin on my mother’s side and much older than me. He became a lawyer and someone convinced him that he should work his way to Prime Minister, so he did.  When my sister and were young, my mother took us to visit him several times. Whenever we went he would let us use his car. It was a black some-thing-or-other and had all the official flags on it. Wherever we were, people would stop to stare or even wave. We thought we were royalty. Princesses. Due to the stress of his job, he died before he was 45 but I’ll never forget feeling like we were important.”

We talked for several more minutes before I left but  I’ll never forget the conversation I had with the Prime Minister’s cousin.

That’s right, I know people.