Interversity.Org

I think the single most powerful book I ever read that made a major difference in my life was Tolkeins' Lord of the Rings. He spoke at our campus. I didn't know who he was or what he wrote. I was just there, one of many hundred, trying to hear with that hat on, all 1 ft forward of it, and 3 ft wingspan of it. I don't even know what he said exactly but I know it was enough for me to get into his books.

I read those books over and over and over. I still re-read them, only now my husband bought a huge leather bound copy of it so I'd stop giving away the paperback copies of it. Those books, its words, its journey and talk and tales it took me on, were unbelieveable. I was a Reborn Tolkein without ever knowing I had been born in the first place.

There was one set of words said by Samwise to Frodo, that flamed out at me, burned my brain, and settled in my soul of souls. I have highlighted and reread them until they are buried into the very dna of me: Frodo has been struck down, and Samwise just knows it is for him to finish the journey. He says, "I have something to do before the end, sir...I must see it through, if you understand..." God and all his angels could not have spoken more loudly to me. Thunder. Lightning. Whatever hits, I was hit.

However, knowing you have 'something to do before the end' and then actually getting your butt in gear, doing it, well, there's a lot of years between.

A good seven more years passed before I finally said for real: "I'm outta here."

You have to understand something first: in the Order, the Community, you wore your Habit, your clothing as given to you, always.
You had two outfits for life. Oops! You got a 3rd one after five years, when you made your first Vows. You brushed it clean, nightly, you cleaned out the lint between the pleats, in the skirt, 13 pleats, each, 5 inches in depth btw. You cleaned the little whatevers that where pulled together on the apron to gather it up so that you had this full flared apron of wool. Toothbrush worked well on this. Well, most people cleaned all this stuff. I just brushed.

No, we did NOT SEND STUFF to dry cleaners. In fact, it never even occured to me to even ask about it. We brushed our clothing, like good women in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries did. We only washed our 'first articles' and some mysterious power starched our headpieces and our collars. Every Saturday, we wasted two good hours 'pulling' our cornette into shape on a toquois and pinning everything with all the right kind of pins.

See, we had this hanging pinball from our pockets that kept our cornette pins, our chimesette pins, and our toquois pins--all different sizes and strengths. I know not where they came from. I have never to this day seen the likes of them in normal stores.

It was a truism: if we couldn't pin it, tie it, or hook it, we didn't wear it. And, did you know that shoelaces can be used in amazing ways when you gained weight or lost weight, but you still only have these special outfits just for you to wear? The creativity of womanhood with clothing made with limits, severe limits, is absolutely amazing.

I am convinced now, in my old age: go ahead and limit me and watch my creativity grow! Go ahead and tell me which books I can and cannot read, and watch me write books of my own, and illustrate them!

"Oh you poor thing, how stifled you must feel!" my gramma used to say to me on visiting Sundays. Little did she know how I had found trees with vines to swing on and over creeks during 'recreation'--walk and talk indeed! To this day, we fdc's call it 'vining' when we do the memory trips! Little did my gramma suspect how my mind broke loose and free and wrote and wrote and wrote! Poems! Epic poetry, Sister Mariella Gable OSB, called it, with strophe, antistrope, and epode. I had no idea I was doing all that stuff. In fact, my first poem published was through Sister Mariella Gable, a Benedictine (whole different Order of nuns but she was brilliant!)in a magazine called TODAY. The 'epic' was called 'Little boy Lost'. It was really the story of my brother and what had happened to him as he grew. (We won't go into that.)

I like education, and learning, and letting my mind out for a run, even if my feet didn't do much of it. No, that's not true. I had some rollar skates, old Chicago rollar skates, someone donated to 'the good Sisters'--I hated that term. But I loved the rollar skates. And baseball games.
All this stuff was now part of me, this clothing, these books, writing, creating, swinging on trees, catching baseballs, brushing Habits, and doing all the funny little traditions that made little to no sense to do, but they certainly were different, and interesting.
Like, on Friday, we didn't sit down and eat. We stood up and ate. Ok. I did that. We didn't peel oranges; we cut off one end, and ate them out with a spoon. Different, yeah, but i could do it. We listened to someone read at us from some good and holy book, or good and holy life, and then we ended with the Roman Martyrology...talk about listening to violence while eating! Listen to it sometime.
We washed our our socks and hankerchiefs. (Was Kleenex invented yet? I have no clue.) We changed our sheets once a month; we did the inside out, upside, downside, sidewards thing for a month. Ok. I handled that.
I was getting used to this way of living. Strange as that may sound, I was.