My mother’s mother, widowed and with no other children, came to stay with us two years after our emigration to Canada. It was the first time she had left Poland, left the small town where she lived in her familiar one-bedroom apartment, with the bench outside where all her neighbours congregated and the nearby cemetery where she could tend my grandfather’s grave. The hope was that she would spend the rest of her days with us, her closest and dearest kin. Instead, in our strange suburban house in this sprawling foreign land, she was lost, wildly uprooted. After a year, it was clear she could only ever be a visitor. Stronger than family bonds, we discovered, were ties to language,  culture, home.

From my current daily writing practice with three women across the continent. Word prompt: visitor