" 'mid oaks and towering pines..."

From sixth thru twelfth grade, I went to a Catholic school nestled among the oaks and pines of previous centuries. The first few years I attended there, it was a gentle, isolated world of its own. The nuns who taught us and administered the school lived there, as did a number of other nuns who were receiving care in their later years. People from the little town nearby, Grand Coteau, worked there. I have no idea how or what people were paid, but I had the sense that the school in some ways belonged to everybody, and people just showed up daily because that's what they did. Drove and maintained the bus, baked huge sheet cakes, polished the old desks and bruised banisters with mildly fragrant oils.

This was the mid 1960s when I started there. You curtsied to the nuns, just a little bob where the knees relaxed for half a moment and the right foot stepped behind the left. Monday mornings was Primes (preems) - Judgment Day for the previous week. You put on a little pair of white fabric gloves that were kept in your desk just for that reason. A council of teachers and nuns and religious hierarchy sat on the stage of the little auditorium. Each class was called in its turn to make a semicircle before this gathering of generally well-meaning, stern-looking school bureaucracy. There was a little clicker that one of the nuns held in her hand. At the sound of the click, our knees folded as one into a communal curtsy. Each of our names was read aloud. You heard one of these labels: Very Good. Good. Indifferent. Unsatisfactory. Being rather mute unless someone asked me a question, without any effort on my part at all I almost always got 'very good', as did a few other girls. I never saw any of my peers do anything particularly bad or wrong. But now I realize, just by being exuberant chatterboxes, they at times earned merely good, or (very bad Monday morning indeed) indifferent. If anyone ever earned unsatisfactory, I think they were out of the school before Monday morning ever showed up and never returned.

Our study hall desks faced a mural of Mater who was Mother Mary as a girl robed in pink and cream, seated with a spindle and a book at her side. We sang a lot at school, and processed, even sometimes to classes, in order of height. On holy days, or special school days, there might be a Holy Mass in the chapel. You always wore a head covering back then if you were female and inside a Catholic church. So, at school, we wore matching veils. They were stored in heavy manila envelopes and handed out just before the event at hand. Each veil had a tiny comb attached to it so that it would stay on your head. (No, I never heard of anyone getting lice at school.) There were everyday veils of black lace - the fabric was mostly durable tulle. There were formal somber veils of more elaborate black lace. Then, there were dress veils for celebrations - these were of white lace. There was one event each year where boxes of large plastic lilies were taken out, and each of us carried a lily, but I don't remember what the occasion was.

The mid 1960s ran into the late 1960s. Having formerly called the teaching nuns 'Mother', we were now to call them 'Sister.' The curtsies and veils faded, as did Monday morning Primes, and the school became more integrated with the outside world.