Just a short note to tell those interested that my SO and I are on a trip hither and yon, visiting relatives, sight seeing and loving the wonderful scenes along the way. We have such a beautiful country. Heading for TX to see if we can catch a glimpse of greywar before heading back to MN. Take care all and thanks for your interest. I will continue my saga around mid-Sept.
The need for an unrestricted contact with my teenaged beau was prompted not because we had planned to write love letters steaming with lewd desires, (We wouldn’t have even know how to write such letters) but simply from aspiring for freedom of expression without the nuns nitpicking our every word. Even as I began to plot my rebellion, following the Katzenjammer paradigm, nostalgic thoughts of home and hearth suspended my attempts to form a clear strategy. This time my memories didn...
As the first days at boarding school rolled by, I began to adjust. Life was different, very different than the life I had lived at my home. True, my teachers were very European in their ideas of discipline, food, work, values and spirituality, but they were gentle people, not lost in a world of mystic abstraction. They were nothing like some much later perverts who would bring scandal to the Church because they entrusted the supervision of the lives of young people to deeply troubled cleric...
Usually, I worked in the kitchen with two awe-inspiring, very French nuns, Sister Marcella and Sister Martina. What was so marvelous about Sister Marcella? Word had it, that at one time, Sister Marcella had seen a real ghost. Whenever I was around her, I wanted to ask her about that grapevine gossip, but I never got the nerve. She was always very quiet, hard working, a heavily built, muscular woman. She did the outside work, kept the furnace going, planted and cared for the gardens and milked...
After a long night filled with jumbled dreams of home, my mother trying to scold me in strange French terms, meals made up of mysterious ingredients, being exposed naked before a roomful of taunting boys and nuns threatening to sent me home, I awoke to the gonging of an unfamiliar bell. Sister Agnes, who slept in a tiny room at the end of the dorm, emerged from it ,fully dressed. She called out, “Blessed be God for ever.” All the girls responded, “Let us arise to do His Holy Will.” I thought ...
Soon after we passed the little village of Wild Rice, ND, Father pointed out St. Benedict’s Catholic Boarding School and the adjacent church. I gasped as I saw the large gloomy, gray buildings surrounded by a high wire enclosure. My heart jumped to my throat at the thought of being fenced in this strange place. My disconcerted mind began to whirl with harsh images of doom and gloom. Then I had a revelation. I knew better than that! Through many summers I had enjoyed my classes with the...
As the years went on, my older brothers and sisters left home, one by one, to earn a living. Finally there were left only the five youngest. I was second youngest. Every summer from the age of ten, I earned a little money by hiring out to baby-sit or help some farm family. I helped cook, clean the house, wash the cream separator, feed the calves, weed the garden, iron clothes and do anything else I was asked to do. I stayed with the family during the week, earning a high wage of one dolla...
My mother taught her large family of ten offspring by her example more than by specific instructions. She may not have known all the finer points of what it meant to be a Christian, but she obviously looked beyond her own abilities to raise her family responsibly. I will always remember her as a woman of prayer. She was very conscious of God’s presence in her heart. To me she reflected calmness, a freedom, and a peace that came from her trust in God’s goodness. I can still remember the d...
What a great day of entertainment I had yesterday. I spent the day working with other people involved in Habitat for Humanity. We didn’t get quite to the stage of “raising the roof,” but we sure had a lot of fun despite the cool, rain-threatening weather. After we had finished signing all kinds of waivers dealing with the legal questions, we squished our way, very cautiously, up the muddy, clay-slimy path to the beginning of a house that is destined to be occupied by a single mother with ...