I heard a man's voice yesterday. He spoke Hamlet's line to Ophelia, 'Get thee to a nunnery!' I thought that was amusing, and, having no other plans for the late afternoon, I thought - where are there nunneries around here? (meaning Austin, Texas, and surrounding area.)

Four different Catholic churches came to mind - but as far as I know, none are associated with convents. I am familiar with some convents, but they are in Houston and south central Louisiana. (And there may be one east of here that raises miniature horses?)

Then - ding! - of course! Two enthusiastic nuns founded and ran a very small school in our neighborhood in northeast Hays County in the 1980s and 90s, kindergarten through third grade. (This was good - as close as I could get to the concept of nunnery on such short notice.) Our sons went there. The school closed around 2001, after the sisters retired. 

I know they no longer live there, and the school is boarded up by a different owner. But I'd just completed knitting a scarf, so I took it and the one I finished a day or two earlier as offerings of appreciation even though the nuns are not there.

No one was on the property when I drove up. I walked around the old parking lot and driveway where we once dropped off and picked up our kids, and where festivals were held. It was very hot and very dry and peacefully overgrown. Though the place looks woefully abandoned, decorated with this and that debris, it somehow still rings with the voices of children and teachers who grew gardens, and brought their sandwiches and carrots and cookies to school and went to Mass and stuck paper signs with Spanish vocabulary words on everything that stood still, and colored and wrote poems and played basketball and learned about distant countries, multiplication tables, and famous writers and composers. Still, there is a big contrast between the tidy little school when it was active and its state of deterioration today.

I hung the scarves on the broken railing of the covered walkway with a note - 'Dominican Academy lives on in the students who learned here.'

Somehow, I know the good sisters got the message.