SISTER Theo looks just like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz. She wears a black dress down to her shoes. Her shoes are black too. She doesn’t have a witch hat but a black veil with a white thing around the edge. You can’t see her hair. She has a big nose and small shiny eyes and thin lips. When she gets mad her right shoulder lifts, and her head twitches to the side. She has a cross around her neck, and big brown rosary beads hanging down her side. You can hear them clicking when she walks down the hallway. We know she’s coming, and we run. All the Sisters dress like that.
Yesterday Sister really scared a little boy. His mum was bringing his older sister back to school from the holidays. Sister Theo saw them and walked up to welcome them. She’s nice to parents. That little boy saw Sister coming and he started to back away from her. His eyes were big and his mouth was open. “Are you a witch?” he squeaked. Poor Sister looked hurt. I guess that little boy never saw a nun before. We all looked away. My mum tells us never to stare at people.
My mum is pretty. She has long black hair and big brown eyes like Dorothy. When my mum brushes her hair it spreads out in little waves all down her back. I like watching her brush her hair. Sometimes she stops brushing and lets me run my fingers through her hair. Then she braids it and winds it like a little crown around her head. It’s neat and tidy that way, she says. When she goes to town she wears a little hat that curves down to one side.
When my mum speaks she speaks softly. She smiles and laughs a lot. There’s this little song she sings when she is washing the dishes or sewing, or holding a baby. It has no words and it sounds happy and sad at the same time. When she sings that song nobody talks. It makes me think of a wonderful faraway land where the grass is so green it’s like the crayon pictures we used to draw in grade one. It’s happy there, and when you come back you want to be the kindest person who ever lived. I asked Mum what she was singing once, and she said, “Oh, just a little song.”
Mum likes it when it rains or snows. When it rains she looks out the window and says her tiger lilies will grow. When it snows she says it reminds her of Christmas when she was a little girl and her dad was the blacksmith. He told her and her brothers and sisters that if they were really good, Santa would bring them something. They had to wash their cotton stockings and hang them up beside the heater stove. On Christmas morning they would run to the stockings to see if they got anything. Sure enough, they got candies and apples. Sometimes there were oranges, but they were really small and dried out. My mum said she didn’t mind, because it was a treat to get them at all.
She said in those days in the winter they went everywhere with horses and sleighs, and there were real jingle bells on the harnesses. She was born in 1915, when nobody had cars in Firefly.