Sisters in Heart

This past weekend I went home again.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gone home many times before.  After all, my sister lives in our family home.  But last weekend has really taken me again.  Last weekend was set aside for my high school reunion.  I never was one for reunions.  I like family reunions fine, but those people have to love you.  High school was a different story.  In fact, I used to say all the time about reunions that I didn’t like those people when I went to school with them, why would I like them now.  That was not true.  I liked most everybody I had any dealings with in high school.  But I didn’t think that they liked me (typical high school, right?).  But because of the outreach of social media I not only like a whole lot of the girls I went to high school with, I know that they like me.  I mean, Facebook “likes” don’t lie, right?  So I was excited to go home again.

On my way over to my alma mater I started at my childhood home.  I drove the exact path that I had walked and then drove to school every morning.  As much as I always wanted to be able to ride to school I walked most days because my sister was always running late.  I rode by Ms. Duane’s house.  I turned at the Hillebrand house.  I looked over to see Diane Ferriell’s house to make sure it was still standing.  I looked over to the Misses Bell’s house to see if either of them were on the porch.  As I turned onto Eline I was amazed at how small the roads were.  I don’t remember them being that narrow.  As I got to Cannons Lane I noticed how grown up that corner was.  I use to be a safety patrol guard there.  I think I still have my badge somewhere.  But that corner was so small.  So onto McCready and to that little road that cut through to the back of the Ursuline campus.  It was still there but that was pretty much all that was the same.  The retreat center was gone, replaced with a parking lot.  But there was a huge building where our parking lot used to be.  I was early.  One thing I remember about our class, we were never early.  I was going to go in and walk the halls but they were doing some major renovations so I didn’t get to do that.  Instead I went into this huge new gym that was decorated for all of the reunions happening that weekend.  They do that now, just have a reunion weekend so every class having a reunion could meet at the school on Friday night.  Saturday was set aside for the classes to get together individually.  It didn’t take long for the gym to fill up with people, and noise.  That’s the other thing about my class, we were not quiet.  In fact, one of the speakers told us that she would give us detention.  We almost dared her.  But I regress . . . in fact, this whole paragraph has been a regression.

 

 

One thing I have come to realize in the last 5 or 6 years is that these women that I went to school with are my sisters, just like I was told they would be.  These are the women in my life who will be for me through thick and thin only because for 4 short years in our lives we shared a bond, went to school together.  And it was not just any school.  We went to an all-girl-Catholic high school, Sacred Heart Academy, in Louisville, KY.  We were bonded in an environment made up of a lot of hard work, discipline, expectations, and a whole lot of love.  Because while were trying to pass Algebra with Sr. Bridget, we were also learning to make friends with people who would be our friends for a lifetime.  Suffering through World History with Sr. Francine gave us the stories that we would repeat for years and years.  We learned that we could experiment with things we had never before encountered because Sr. Lorna and Miss Herp and Sr. Patrick showed no fear in our science labs.  We might not have learned everything we needed to know about our faith but we did learn an awful lot about ourselves because of the patience of many of the Ursuline sisters, like Sr. Judith.  And being able to laugh at ourselves as we tried to be graceful while taking ballet with Mrs. Wooten, who was always so serious.

We learned about winning ball games and then championships with women who were forces to contend with, like Bunny Daugherty.  We learned to be women of class as we attempted to govern ourselves or motivate ourselves with women like Sr. Ruth Ann or Sr. Rosemary.  We learned to get up in front of a group of any size and present ourselves and who we were only because of the determination of Sr. Ann Margaret (Sr. Lynn).  And we learned about the peace and power of prayer from the entire Ursuline community.

Of course there are those who strictly taught us what we needed to know:  Madame Danzig or Frau Danzig never gave any of us a break.  If we were determined to learn a language then by gosh she was going to make sure we did.  Sr. Helen inspired a love of history in our lives.  Sr. Margaret Ann challenged us kindly every step of the way.  And there are those of us who only learned the classics of literature because of the persistence and sense of humor of Fr. C.J. Wagner, right Corrigan?

And the reason that we can go home again, and must go home again, is to be able to pass that strength onto the women behind us:  our daughters, our friends, our colleagues, and our communities.  Because what we learned on that plot of land on Lexington Road has reached far and wide across our country and across our world.  There are those of us who claim that the only reason they have been successful in our world is because of the vision and stubbornness of women like Mrs. Cornell or Mrs. Volz.

But then look at the women we have become.  From mothers to professionals and now grandmothers in one fell swoop.  Some of us have worked the way we were taught to make others’ lives better.  Whether we did that through our profession or our charity or our faith or our family, we are women who have encouraged other women to be all that they could be, and then some.  Because when it comes down to it, that’s why we all go home, to encourage the next group of women behind us.  And as sisters beside each other I think this was the weekend that I came to realize that.

Love you, sis.