A Letter from Europe by Mongolita

It was a sunny and beautiful day so took my baby girl for a stroll down to Parque Palermo in Buenos Aires. Normally we would stay for a couple of hours feeding the ducks and meandering in the woods. When I suddenly saw the change of that blue sky turning into a menacing gray cloud which definitely meant heavy rain. We hurried home, I knew this humid sub tropical rain as we often referred to ‘the Monsoon from the Amazonia', could easily soak us right through in seconds. I once experienced being soaked by this kind of rain, and after it stopped the dampness of your clothes turned into steem, a sticky and uncomfortable experience that I didn't want to encounter again.

We had just missed the rain and as I walked into the foyer of the Hotel Rich in Buenos Aires, pushing my baby girl in the pram, Ester from reception called out:

“Hola Maria Elena there's correspondence for you” waving the envelope.

“Ah thanks” I approach the desk and saw a letter with a foreign stamp on it, I recognised the sender's writing.

“Oh, it's mum.” I exclaimed with glee. “I wrote to her as soon as we knew we'd been accepted to go to the UK but I haven't heard from her since their departure to Belgium. It could well be her reply to mine"

“Don't worry if it isn’t, letters take almost two weeks to reach Europe, maybe your letters could've even crossed paths.” Ester reassures me.

“By the way, it’s great news about you being accepted to go to the UK, you've been waiting for it long enough; d’you know when you're flying there?” she asks. 

“Not yet, we are going to see Zulema tomorrow to know all the details. I better go, I'm dying to read what mum says in her letter, talk later”

I couldn't wait to get to my room to read the letter so I stopped in the corridor. When I opened it, a photo fell out. It was mum, dad and my younger sister in the photo at the ‘Grand Place’ the main square in Brussels, smiling and looking happy. 

When I saw the photo, I realised I miss them. A tear trickled down my cheek of sadness. 

“Oh, how much I miss you all, but I'm sure after we fly to the UK we'll be able to reunite” I tried to give myself courage.

In mum's letter, she tells a bit about Brussels, the capital of Europe, and how busy they've been to find their way around the town. They have finally settled in and found an apartment in Anderlecht, one of the municipalities of Brussels. She found the French language has been challenging and so did dad; but not for my younger sister, who’s picked it up almost instantly and would be joining the local school the following term.

She ended her letter by saying: “Hope to hear from you soon hija, love you and miss you always”  

 

“Hmm Ester was right, they haven't received my letter about our big news.” 

After I finished reading it I hurried to show my husband the letter and commented to him that they haven’t received mine.  

The following week my letter was returned and in big red writing which read: RETURN TO SENDER - ADDRESS UNKNOWN. I quickly compared both addresses, the one I had written in my address book to the one on the letter to mum, realising that I had written Rue instead of Boulevard. “But how could I make such a huge mistake?” I was baffled.

I remembered that at the foot of mum's letter she writes a telephone number that she specifically said to be used only in case of an urgent matter. But is this an urgent and important matter! Is it?