Sister Rose Alma and the Little Brick Schoolhouse

Sister Rose Alma and the Little Brick Schoolhouse                                          

           A recent business venture led me through my old neighborhood in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. Going through this, now ram shacked, part of town, I went past an obscure little red brick building that took my breath away. What triggers the senses after all these years is simply remarkable. I knew this place! I had to pull over and just sit for a moment, a quiet moment, a moment to reflect.

           As a five-year-old, I did not attend Kindergarten, so my first experience with the educational system was the first grade. I was perfectly happy staying at home where I felt safe and content. I was quite leery about leaving my treasured home and protective mother in order to enter a whole new world and what I thought was a suspicious environment. My older sister was charged with my welfare and was to see to it that I was deposited where I was supposed to be. At the time, I never thought about a building as having a certain smell nor of the classroom being particularly odiferous, but that school did have its own aroma, one which I could not fathom. And, sitting in my car that day, that’s what brought it all back. It was all about the smell.

            It smelled like food, it smelled like flowers, and it smelled old. Into this jungle of scents, I was thrust into the melee with dozens of other children all running into different rooms at the same time, pushing me from one side of the hall to the other.    

           I laid back in the car and was catapulted back in time as if it were just yesterday. I saw myself as a young girl of six entering school for the first time. I was engulfed with a flash of memories I hadn’t consciously thought about in over fifty years. It was 1956 again! I saw myself in first grade – 4^th row in, 5^th seat from the back, in Sister Rose Alma’s first grade class at Notre Dame de Lourdes’ French Catholic Grammar School in Lowell, Massachusetts.

           I saw my desk with the attached seat, (that old piece of wooden furniture), which was to be my home for the next ten months. It had a place for my pencil, and a space under the top for my composition book. Into this book I practiced over and over again printing capital and lower-case letters in the Palmer Method until each letter was picture perfect.

           I remembered the smell of the bookshelves that contained the old Dick and Jane primers and the means by which I learned to read.

            I could smell the dried milk in the bin that held thirty cartons, one of which was given to each student at precisely ten o’clock every morning. My nostrils inhaled the chalk on the blackboard that I helped to clean once a week, the board that listed the math problems we had to solve each morning while Sister took attendance.

           I remembered the smell of the rain that pelted the sills when Sister would open the windows for a little fresh air on those early hot summer days, and how she would let us go out into the hall and get a drink of water from the bubbler.

           I could smell the inside of the church (St. Jean Baptiste) where we, as a class, went to on the first Friday of every month, and the smell of the incense that Father shook into the air enveloping the vestibule with, what I later called, a religious fragrance.

           I remembered the scent of the most beautiful lilac trees that grew in the courtyard during the month of May, (my birthday month), and the musty odor of the broom closet where resided the broom with the longest wooden handle ever made and a brush at the bottom that was so wide, it covered half the room in one pass.

           I remembered my very first boyfriend, Billy Rocha, and the smell of the hair cream his mom made him wear and how he kissed me in the cloakroom on that cold December day.

           But, most of all, I remember Sister Rose Alma, (Ma Soeur). She was a tiny little thing in a long black habit that had the deepest pockets we ever saw. They contained, not only her rosary, but several pens, pencils, erasers, and even a pair of pliers. No matter what went wrong in the classroom, Sister could fix it. She was a member of the Grey Nuns of the Cross, a French-Canadian order, and we truly believed God spoke directly to Sister and had her pass it on to us.     Every now and then, she would slip back into her native tongue, and we would get half the lesson in French and half the lesson in English. Sister didn’t have a fragrant smell. Nuns were not allowed to wear perfume or use shampoo back then because they weren’t allowed to have hair. She had kind of a starchy odor about her which I can only presume came from the amount of starch it took to keep her headset in place. We knew when she was coming before we saw her. That smell preceded her.

           Sister was kind and judged herself on our success. She never gave up on a student, and never let a student give up. But lest you think she was a pushover, she could smell a Hostess Twinkie or a Bonomo Candy Bar from a hundred feet away and heaven help the perpetrator that was caught eating these snacks during Lent. That poor soul would have brush duty for a solid week. She meant business. She could play volleyball with the girls and football with the boys, a woman of many talents. But as strict as she was, we knew she always had our backs. In later years, I came to realize just how gifted this woman was and how fortunate we were to have her as our teacher.

           We would all go on to face our share of fears, faults, and failures, but I believe the resiliency and perseverance we showed later in life, was formed early on in that little brick building called Notre Dame, under the guidance of that tiny little nun, in the long black habit, named Sister Rose Alma.