Our April arrival on Marco turned into May and then summer. i began to get nervous about where we would go. Mother didn’t lose any sleep over it, like Jesus asleep in the back of the boat in the storm. But my lack of faith kept beleaguering me to beleaguer Mother with, "October will be here fast. Where are we going to go? Our money is nearly all gone. How are we going to get wherever we’re gong To go" Mother’s faith, on the other hand, answered, "I don’t know, but the Lord does. He’ll let us know in good time."
Even I knew we need not be homeless; there were many many secular friends and family members who would take us in, feed us, shelter us, love us. Provide for us entirely, if we had been willing to take advantage of them. But we weren’t willing. Moreover, we needed above all else, to safeguard our vocations, to nurture them so that we could continue to grow spiritually as we’d been called to do. Contemplative monastic vocations cannot receive all they need and go their deepest, in a secular world. That is why monasteries exist. The life is to be away from the world. Not because the world is bad. Of course it isn’t; God created it and gifted us with it. The life is to be away from the world simply so that one is spared the distractions to be better able to concentrate, keep focused.
My lack of faith was helped some by Mother’s faith, but it didn’t erase entirely my worry. Mother had contacted a number of abbot-friends and an abbess asking whether we could live on their land, apart from the community, but attend the Liturgy with them, in exchange for whatever work they’d allow us to do for them. No.
She had also been gathering realty advertisement booklets and pamphlets from those little racks outside grocery stores and such places. That seemed rather unrealistic to me. All those little pictures of all those wonderful places to live had great big numbers underneath them. I figured out that they expected you to BUY those places.
October loomed closer and closer. Our eyes, and our hearts somehow, burned now from the ever-glare of sun on sea and sea on sand. How we missed the "regular places" of the monastery. How we missed mountains. And trees. Proud trees that stand tall with branches outstretched, rather than twisted by wind and salt air into giant bonsai shapes. Trees with leaves instead of prickles or fronds. Trees that had the sense to drop their leaves, go to sleep, and then wake up and give birth to fresh spring-green buds. How we missed grass that grows and gets out of hand. Has some parts that get taller than the other parts quicker than they should. Grass that doesn’t stab your bare toes, but cool-green-soothes them, and almost tickles.
Providentially, an acquaintance had sent Mother (unrequested but appreciated) the back cover of a magazine with some toll-free 800-numbers for realtors. As she spoke with each one, Mother was told that the agency did not handle rentals. One last number to call. In North Carolina. "I’m interested in renting something very small," she told the gentleman. "It has to be near a Catholic church and it has to be rural. And because of our finances, it has to rent for no more than $200 a month," she added nonchalantly.
The fellow, like the others, said he did not handle rental properties. However, he said that he taught school with a lovely lady whom he recalled had an apartment she sometimes rented. He did not know whether she still rented it and, if she did, whether it was currently rented. He didn’t know what the rent was. He didn’t know what the apartment was like. He didn’t know if we would like it. It was rural. There was a Catholic church about sixteen miles from it. He would contact his teacher friend and then call us back. Sure.
What businessman, having learned that this caller had no money to buy his properties, is nevertheless for not even a nominal fee, gong to go to all the trouble of calling a co-worker to ask all of our questions, and then extend himself further to make a long distance phone call to Florida to relay this information? The answer is a gentleman from North Carolina would do that. Or a gentleman from Tennessee or Georgia would do that. That’s what folks are like in this area of the country where the three states converge and intersect towns and even our parish church.
Folks here don’t have the country-bumpkin naivete that was portrayed in Opie’s Mayberry, but they do have the country heart of that little town. You can go in to many if not most businesses and when you discover you left your money home, they’ll let you leave with your stuff, trusting you to come back later to pay, like you said you would. Or, if your car breaks down along the road out of town and you ask to use someone’s phone, they’ll let you, and if it’s dinner time, they’ll talk you into sitting down to eat with them while you wait for the fellow to come tow your car. That’s mostly the kind of place this is and that’s mostly the kind of folks these are. Good people.
He called back with the lady’s phone number. And what a lady, in every sense of the word, she was/is. A sort of earth-mother old-timey southern lady as at home in one of her gardens as in one of her classrooms or child-advocate meetings. A deeply devout Baptist who lives her Christianity every moment, usually at sacrifice of herself. Rescuer of creatures animal and human and nun. All of the kindnesses this classy lady lavished upon us over the next three and a half hears would fill an entire chapter of its own.
However, we didn’t know any of this at that point. She was just someone at the other end of that phone number. Mother phoned her. Yes, there was a small four-room apartment over he husband’s carpentry shop, which she sometimes rented. In fact, she had just recently rented it. However, the folks had found it too rural and the apartment was quickly empty again. Yes, we could come see it and yes, it all worked out, she could accept just $200/month rent. They set a day and time.
We arrived after two nights of camping, and only when watching the news on the motel (so we could clean up after camping!) television that night, did we first realize that we’d just missed Hurricane Andrew. Or he us. Neither of us had realized a few days earlier, while still in Florida, that Andrew was impending. Surely the TV news stations were tracking it and informing folks about it. Mother’s sister had kindly paid for the TV cable to continue for our sakes, and so we also had the weather channel, but somehow, probably because we didn’t watch much TV, we’d missed that Andrew was coming. And that folks living on the beach possibly in his path, would have to leave. We just happened to have to leave for our trip to NC/TN, and Providentially, our egress happened just prior to the official evacuation warnings.
We left just before the hurricane arrived and returned just after the cleanup had started. Marco Island, even those of us right on the beach, had been lucky. There was some wind damage and some water damage, but not devastation. We drove to the grocery and library and church by circuitous routes, to see what nature had done. That is what most animals do after a catastrophe of some kind, keep staring at the damage, over and over for awhile, as though it takes many looks and long looks and frequent looks to comprehend the changes. We humans animals just do it from the broken-air-conditioned front seat of a vehicle.
Except we got out of the vehicle periodically. For Mother to ask folks if we could have what the storm had damaged and they were throwing out, there at the curb. For example, many lanai were damaged when blowing debris tore the screening. It needed to be replaced. Yet there were entire segments that two little old nuns, incognito, could salvage. The fact that we are still, to this day, finding uses here at the monastery, for what pieces we still have left of that lanai screening, does not decease by one jot the embarrassment I used to feel as we salvaged.
We salvaged elsewhere too, you see. It was Mother’s fault, because she was the superior and because she loves to salvage stuff. I’m convinced that it’s a thing that they will one day find is on one of the human genes somewhere, this peculiar drive and glee at digging through someone else’s discarded stuff, and in it, finding treasures. But in Mother, it’s more than just genetic or even spiritually virtuous. It’s something she especially loves to do and has honed to a fine skill. Add to that the fact that society gives it a nice name: thrift, and the Church assigns it a nice value: responsible stewardship, and there is no way that my horrified, "Oh Mother, you aren’t going to look through that dumpster are you?" could elicit anything but her, "Sure, why?"
"Because someone might see us."
"We’re not doing anything wrong, it’s not stealing; they’ve thrown this stuff away," she counsels patiently, as she gives a little jump up to the front edge of the dumpster where she balances on her tummy.
"I know, Mother, but this is a very fancy condominium, even the dumpster is carpeted," I hiss
chagrined as she starts picking through.
"So, then, you’ve looked in here too," she states rather than asks.
"Well, it is my job to take out the garbage," I humbly remind her.
"The garbage dumpster is outside. This is the inside dumpster for non-garbage," she gently points out.
"I know, Mother," I admit sheepishly. "I put the garbage in the outdoor dumpster and the non-garbage in this one," I reassure her.
"Angela?"
"Yes, Mother?"
"We don’t throw away non-garbage, we collect it."
"Yes, Mother."
All these years later as I write this and Mother reads it, she reminds me of how pathetic I was
standing at the particular corner where I could see the elevator and both other directions from which folks could come, so that I could hiss pleadingly, "Someone’s coming, Mother, puh-leeze get out of the dumpster till they go by."
She also reminds me that we still have that $69 solid brass bonsai planter (price sticker still on the bottom), that $39 vase, that fancy double boiler with just the tiniest scratch on the bottom, and a little bit of that powder pink carpeting from that same dumpster.
"Did we really and truly transport that stuff from Marco Island to this monastery?" I ask in disbelief although I know we did it.
"Indeed," Mother assures me.
"Whatever for?" I ask, still trying to understand.
"Well, because we collected it, obviously>"
But I’ve gotten out of sequence in the story. It was now the month before we had to leave. We’d left the first month’s rent in Tennessee and the apartment would be there for us October 1st.
When Mother had spoken to the gentleman in NC and then to the lady, she hadn’t indicated that we were nuns. That was not for any devious reason, but rather so that neither would give us special treatment because of it, as often happens though it is unearned and undeserved.
We fell in love with the apartment and even Moreno, its remote rural setting, tucked away on 75 acres of nature’s beauty and peacefulness. Our only close neighbor, this lady and her husband, we would soon come to cherish. As they began discussing business, Mother suggested that the lady let us call her the next day for answer, assuring her sincerely that we would truly understand if she might not want two Catholic nuns as such close neighbors.
She was startled but immediately, with her typical poise and grace, assured us that she had no doubts about us just because we were Catholic or nuns. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Site Navigation