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Winter 2022
A Letter from the Secluded Sisters of the Missouri Valley
I took a Medieval European History class in college and memories from that class are a nice tonic against any sort of Catholic nostalgia. Those monasteries, for example, were stuffed with children from rich families whose older brothers were already going to inherit all of the wealth and land; a place that would house and feed excess kids that needed to be stashed somewhere for an incredibly high fee-- think a Swiss boarding school without a graduation. As a result, the populations of these monasteries were not necessarily the most devout or divinely passionate people in the area. So, the amount of holy contemplation and prayer going on had a pretty wide standard of deviation. Any readers who went to a college with a population of wealthy private school kids can confirm that they are not necessarily spending their free time making the world a better place. Many are too busy drinking and fucking like a French Abbot.
Every few generations, some monk would show up with a new, better, stricter code of ethics; something that would move people away from *sin* and towards silent, hungry prayer (God’s favorite). This context makes a lot of Catholic heroes seem more like narcs and killjoys. But, after the rules were put in place, those monasteries would start to slip. After a few generations or so, they were back to the Yale dinner club hedonism we’ve come to associate with the Catholic church.
I think that this sort of natural tide, that ebb and flow between rules and their dissolution, is true of most institutions. We at the Secluded Sisters of the Missouri Valley have also slipped a little bit. Part of our *pretty lax* vows are manual labor and supporting our community. And that can feel easy in the summer when we’re running the farm. Manual labor isn’t hard to come by and half of our food goes to groups fighting hunger in our community. Easy-peasy*. But once winter comes around, things get a lot lazier. My grandfather had cows, so he’d run out on snowy winter mornings to deliver bales of hay for food and break the ice to free up the drinking water underneath. We don’t have any animals. When it’s freezing here, we all sleep in.
When it snowed in early January, Ali proposed that we all ought to go and shovel some driveways. For a few years now, Alex has been giving rides to a handful of older fellas in the county; so we figured they were probably a good place to start. It seemed like the perfect mix of 1) people who would appreciate the assistance a little more than most and 2) people who Alex could talk down if they started threatening us snowy trespassers with a shotgun.
I can’t fully explain the next decision we made other than I can relay that the idea got us all a little excited: We decided to do it secretly in the middle of the night so that they would wake up to a great surprise. Colder? Yes. Tiring? Sure. More difficult? Absolutely. We could barely see. But there is an air of showmanship about it that I stand by.
I’m sure we looked like a bunch of oddballs; popping up in the middle of the night with our bright jackets and blue snow pants, holding plastic flashlights in our mouths to make sure we weren’t digging up the gravel with the snow. When a van pulls up and a dozen reflective, hooded figures (shooting light out of their mouths) start grabbing tools out of the trunk, it might be the right time to lock yourself in the laundry room.
I kept thinking of a friend of mine when I went to Creighton. She had grown up in Boulder and started dating a guy from Denver. When they went home for Thanksgiving (separately), she snuck out in the middle of the night to meet him in some suburban parking lot halfway between their parent’s houses. They were hooking up in the back seat when they heard a siren and saw lights in the distance. As they panicked and rushed to find all of their clothes before the police arrived, all niceties went out the window. They were shoving and shouting and bickering until a firetruck barrelled past and they realized they were in the clear. The relationship, though, never survived the fight. Both realized that in the heat of the moment, the other was only going to worry about themselves. I love this friend, but I would posit that this is a true and deep narcissism; two people who can’t understand why the other doesn’t realize that they are the most important person in the world.
Our first big shoveling trip happened early enough in January that college kids still hadn’t headed back to campus. I kept hoping that we would pull up to shovel somewhere and see a parked car on the side of the road with two twenty year olds panicking to clothe themselves before our van of aliens secreted them off the planet. While they were running in circles around the car trying to find their sweaters, we’d shout to them: “Don’t worry. I know that we’re dressed like a Danish Death Squad, but really we’re just a bunch of kind and non-judgemental friends from a nearby convent who decided to shovel some gravel driveways in the middle of the night. You can go back to your erotic exploits. Again, we’re not going to judge you or tattle or steal you away in the dark of night. We’ll focus on this driveway over here and you can focus on your car fucking over there.” And then one of them would say something like, “Wow, thank you so much, Sarah. That’s really opened my eyes. I grew up in a pretty repressive religious environment, so it’s reassuring to see that there might be room to meld the religious rituals I still find comforting with a more kind and non-judgemental way of living life. I’m gonna give this some serious thought. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to having some awkward but energetic car sex.”
Unfortunately, we didn’t see another living soul all night. What a shame, the fun things in my head never come true!
Of our mistakes, the biggest was that we didn’t bring food. It just didn’t occur to us. We had had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What other meals do you need? But once it’s six in the morning and you’ve been shoveling all night, you realize that it’s been almost twelve hours since any of you had anything to eat and, with all the manual labor, you’re starting to go absolutely loopy. Sometimes-- in the right conditions-- there is a point past pretty hungry and very hungry where you become “drunk toddler hungry.” And we ended the night like the graduating class of some prosecco drenched preschool. After we had an all out snowball fight at our last driveway of the night, someone had the good sense to stop by a Casey’s on our way home and grab a couple pizzas.
As we ate in the parking lot of a nearby high school before driving home, I remembered our first harvest as the Secluded Sisters. We weren’t even living on the farm yet because all the ancient pipes in the building needed to be replaced and we were pretty adamant that the decaying outhouse out back remain ornamental. So we carried our crates of produce into the still empty living room to start packing boxes on our long folding table. It took us all weekend just to do that first batch of boxes.
When we finally finished, it was technically Monday morning. Alex came back from the Casey’s bathroom run with two bottles of champagne and a sleeve of paper cups. We didn’t have any furniture, so we just sat against the walls in the hallway and passed the bottles around until we were sleepy and chipper and laughing and tipsy and satisfied. Looking around and feeling so warm, I knew, for the first time, that we were really going to make this thing work.
A couple weeks later, we went on another midnight shoveling run and I bought another pizza and a bottle of that same champagne. Neither tasted as good. Alex accused me of trying to replay my greatest hits. And yes, I’m guilty of that. But why not try? They are my greatest hits after all. Who cares if they slip a little each time?
*Easy-peasy meaning that finding work is easy. The work of farming is actually quite difficult.
Every few generations, some monk would show up with a new, better, stricter code of ethics; something that would move people away from *sin* and towards silent, hungry prayer (God’s favorite). This context makes a lot of Catholic heroes seem more like narcs and killjoys. But, after the rules were put in place, those monasteries would start to slip. After a few generations or so, they were back to the Yale dinner club hedonism we’ve come to associate with the Catholic church.
I think that this sort of natural tide, that ebb and flow between rules and their dissolution, is true of most institutions. We at the Secluded Sisters of the Missouri Valley have also slipped a little bit. Part of our *pretty lax* vows are manual labor and supporting our community. And that can feel easy in the summer when we’re running the farm. Manual labor isn’t hard to come by and half of our food goes to groups fighting hunger in our community. Easy-peasy*. But once winter comes around, things get a lot lazier. My grandfather had cows, so he’d run out on snowy winter mornings to deliver bales of hay for food and break the ice to free up the drinking water underneath. We don’t have any animals. When it’s freezing here, we all sleep in.
When it snowed in early January, Ali proposed that we all ought to go and shovel some driveways. For a few years now, Alex has been giving rides to a handful of older fellas in the county; so we figured they were probably a good place to start. It seemed like the perfect mix of 1) people who would appreciate the assistance a little more than most and 2) people who Alex could talk down if they started threatening us snowy trespassers with a shotgun.
I can’t fully explain the next decision we made other than I can relay that the idea got us all a little excited: We decided to do it secretly in the middle of the night so that they would wake up to a great surprise. Colder? Yes. Tiring? Sure. More difficult? Absolutely. We could barely see. But there is an air of showmanship about it that I stand by.
I’m sure we looked like a bunch of oddballs; popping up in the middle of the night with our bright jackets and blue snow pants, holding plastic flashlights in our mouths to make sure we weren’t digging up the gravel with the snow. When a van pulls up and a dozen reflective, hooded figures (shooting light out of their mouths) start grabbing tools out of the trunk, it might be the right time to lock yourself in the laundry room.
I kept thinking of a friend of mine when I went to Creighton. She had grown up in Boulder and started dating a guy from Denver. When they went home for Thanksgiving (separately), she snuck out in the middle of the night to meet him in some suburban parking lot halfway between their parent’s houses. They were hooking up in the back seat when they heard a siren and saw lights in the distance. As they panicked and rushed to find all of their clothes before the police arrived, all niceties went out the window. They were shoving and shouting and bickering until a firetruck barrelled past and they realized they were in the clear. The relationship, though, never survived the fight. Both realized that in the heat of the moment, the other was only going to worry about themselves. I love this friend, but I would posit that this is a true and deep narcissism; two people who can’t understand why the other doesn’t realize that they are the most important person in the world.
Our first big shoveling trip happened early enough in January that college kids still hadn’t headed back to campus. I kept hoping that we would pull up to shovel somewhere and see a parked car on the side of the road with two twenty year olds panicking to clothe themselves before our van of aliens secreted them off the planet. While they were running in circles around the car trying to find their sweaters, we’d shout to them: “Don’t worry. I know that we’re dressed like a Danish Death Squad, but really we’re just a bunch of kind and non-judgemental friends from a nearby convent who decided to shovel some gravel driveways in the middle of the night. You can go back to your erotic exploits. Again, we’re not going to judge you or tattle or steal you away in the dark of night. We’ll focus on this driveway over here and you can focus on your car fucking over there.” And then one of them would say something like, “Wow, thank you so much, Sarah. That’s really opened my eyes. I grew up in a pretty repressive religious environment, so it’s reassuring to see that there might be room to meld the religious rituals I still find comforting with a more kind and non-judgemental way of living life. I’m gonna give this some serious thought. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to having some awkward but energetic car sex.”
Unfortunately, we didn’t see another living soul all night. What a shame, the fun things in my head never come true!
Of our mistakes, the biggest was that we didn’t bring food. It just didn’t occur to us. We had had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What other meals do you need? But once it’s six in the morning and you’ve been shoveling all night, you realize that it’s been almost twelve hours since any of you had anything to eat and, with all the manual labor, you’re starting to go absolutely loopy. Sometimes-- in the right conditions-- there is a point past pretty hungry and very hungry where you become “drunk toddler hungry.” And we ended the night like the graduating class of some prosecco drenched preschool. After we had an all out snowball fight at our last driveway of the night, someone had the good sense to stop by a Casey’s on our way home and grab a couple pizzas.
As we ate in the parking lot of a nearby high school before driving home, I remembered our first harvest as the Secluded Sisters. We weren’t even living on the farm yet because all the ancient pipes in the building needed to be replaced and we were pretty adamant that the decaying outhouse out back remain ornamental. So we carried our crates of produce into the still empty living room to start packing boxes on our long folding table. It took us all weekend just to do that first batch of boxes.
When we finally finished, it was technically Monday morning. Alex came back from the Casey’s bathroom run with two bottles of champagne and a sleeve of paper cups. We didn’t have any furniture, so we just sat against the walls in the hallway and passed the bottles around until we were sleepy and chipper and laughing and tipsy and satisfied. Looking around and feeling so warm, I knew, for the first time, that we were really going to make this thing work.
A couple weeks later, we went on another midnight shoveling run and I bought another pizza and a bottle of that same champagne. Neither tasted as good. Alex accused me of trying to replay my greatest hits. And yes, I’m guilty of that. But why not try? They are my greatest hits after all. Who cares if they slip a little each time?
*Easy-peasy meaning that finding work is easy. The work of farming is actually quite difficult.
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