Seventy Years in the Same Place

I once met a girl named Carrie who was going to be a nun.

She was about my age, built like a house sparrow, and full of smiles that seemed to spring up out of the depths of her little heart.

Carrie wasn't going to be just any nun. She wanted to be a cloistered nun, she said. I visited the old Franciscan friary where she hoped to dwell for the rest of her days. The buildings in the compound, a church and a house, stood silently in the ghetto part of town, faded red brick and somehow beautiful. In the back, there was a yard, with a meditation garden and a plot for vegetables. The area was surrounded by a high wooden fence; outside loomed the city, the old houses with peeling paint, people in shoddy clothes swinging down the sidewalk with mock defiance written all over their faces.

Inside the compound walls, Carrie said, she and about ten other women would stay forever and always, leading quiet lives until the day they died. They would pray, and sing, and sweep the floors, and sew clothes for charities, and eat, and garden, and laugh, and sleep. This would be her entire world, Carrie told me, this little place in the middle of the ghetto. This would be the stage upon which every scene of her entire future would play out.

When I was about to leave, she gave me a hug. Once the enclosure doors were officially closed, I would not be able to hug her again, except in one special room, where visitors could slip their arms through bars and pat the backs of the nuns in their rugged woolen habits.

I went home and looked at my brochures from study-abroad organizations, staring at pictures of midday in Madrid, sunset in Sydney. I thought about Carrie. Then I thought about criminals who have to live out their days in prison. I thought about villagers in the Tibetan mountains, born and raised and mourned in the same little plot of land. I thought about my great-great-great-great-grandparents, who probably seldom, if ever, set foot outside their hometown in Switzerland.

And for a moment, I could imagine it. Seventy years in the same place. Seventy years looking out the same window every morning. Seventy years eating around the same table, with the same people. Seventy years hoeing the same garden. Seventy years stretching out in the same bed, listening to the same night sounds whispering through the same house.