They say that as long as you remain curious about life, you stay young. If that’s true, I’ve just lost a few decades and am back in my late teens—the age I was when I last saw Sister Margaret-Mary, who was then 13 and known as Meg. We probably never spoke but were familiar in the way children are in small towns, even if their lives never actually collide. So I am deeply curious about why fate has arranged that, all these years later, she is now in my life, and I in hers—and surprised beyond words to find myself, a lapsed Protestant with vaguely Buddhist tendencies, kneeling in prayer in the chapel of a Dominican convent.
I may not understand why, but at least I know how: it’s because, in 2003, I published a memoir called Belonging. Among its themes was the idea of home, the place we are from and the place we are now—in my case, the south of France where my husband and I have settled in the foothills of the Cévennes. Back in my hometown in Canada, my old chemistry teacher, now 96 and in a seniors’ residence, read Belonging with interest, for his daughter and I were childhood friends, and one of his regular visitors is Sister Margaret-Mary’s mother.
Together, they figured out that her daughter’s convent is only a few hours from where I live: he had my address, and thus it was passed to Sister Margaret-Mary who wrote a brief, inquiring note two years ago.
‘Do you remember me?’ she asked, and there was something so wistful about the question that I replied quickly in the affirmative—after checking an old school yearbook from 1961, located with other souvenirs in the attic. Yes, there she was, in the first grade of high school when I was in the last, and I could recall her parents and her family, and even the name of her church, Saint Michael’s. Her family was Catholic and, in our town with a population of 2000 where there were 13 churches and 12 of them Protestant, the congregation of Saint Michael’s was an exotic minority that merited scrutiny.
Catholics were a mystery for the rest of us who were not. We heard they spoke Latin and worshipped idols, and we knew for sure they committed the unpardonable sin of playing bingo in the church basement. We smelled the incense if the windows