After New Years, back on campus, and the blacktop surrounding the Sacred Heart Academy is (again) identified as a "loud and crowded" landscape made for snowball fights and stolen cigarettes. Breath and smoke co-mingle in the icy air and bad behavior is disguised by simply being alive. The snow is dry and difficult to confirm and multiply into ammunition. No grenades are made, bullets perhaps, or pellets to pelt your nemesis. The evidence of your crime will surely melt away.
Churlish girls are hurling pearls at the buoyant boys from the barrio. The convent soldiers, another year older, move like frigid penguins crossing the Winter garden. The flat field rises into two distinct mounds of powdered sugar over which the battling hoards rush and retreat. The nuns shuffle up the glazed sidewalk taking advantage of the pause in the action as both sides rebuild their arsenals.
They have a habit of hardening every dilemma into black and white, a starched morality that is unworkable (unless you live in a convent, with your expenses absorbed by some larger entity, and no possibility for human entanglements--romantic, platonic/public or private--to blow a life off course). The urge is to stop the snowball fight. The desire is to apprehend the cigarettes from frozen fingers, shivering lips.
But until the bell rings, our ladies wait inside with their authority. Sister Mary Elizabeth stands staring out of the library window. A long look, she is lost in memory. She is a girl again and in Montreal the Winter pervades everything. She sleds near the cemetery. She skates on the frozen river. In the depths of the cold, she and her classmates (buses decommishined by the volume of snow) ski to and from the school, as do the teachers. She is eight; she is fourteen; she is only five years old...
The surface of the river cracks. Icicles, suspended like swords, break off and fall from the sky. A nugget of ice compressed like a diamond shatters the glass just as the 8:30 bell calls the young people into the rooms, warm--more or less--haven from the compression of winter.
But until the bell rings, our ladies wait inside with their authority. Sister Mary Elizabeth stands staring out of the library window. A long look, she is lost in memory. She is a girl again and in Montreal the Winter pervades everything. She sleds near the cemetery. She skates on the frozen river. In the depths of the cold, she and her classmates (buses decommishined by the volume of snow) ski to and from the school, as do the teachers. She is eight; she is fourteen; she is only five years old...
The surface of the river cracks. Icicles, suspended like swords, break off and fall from the sky. A nugget of ice compressed like a diamond shatters the glass just as the 8:30 bell calls the young people into the rooms, warm--more or less--haven from the compression of winter.
