ONE DAY, MY son befriends the nun. It starts with voices in the yard. Through the glass kitchen doors where I stand chopping onions, I hear Sebastian's voice and then a woman's. Sebastian, woman-back and forth. Sebastian is five, and when I come out to check on him, his face is pressed into the slats of the fence in the backyard.
This part of New Orleans is called Hollygrove-what Lil Wayne, who grew up here, refers to as "the Holy Mecca." I've also heard it called Pigeon Town, Leonidas, or, in faintly ominous tones, "the fruit streets" a modest subset of what locals call Uptown, with its grand columned houses and clothing boutiques. It's working-class, mostly, with middle-class fringes: White, Black and Latinx.
We've lived here since the summer of 2014, a month before our son was born, when two friends and I unloaded a U-Haul while my wife, hugely pregnant, supervised in the heat.
Hard to say what Sebastian and the woman are discussing. Immersive to him, something else to the woman: Bemusing? Disarming? I really can't say. But I hear traces of it, whatever it is, in the gentle upspeak of the fencetalker's voice, the emphatic, reiterative questions she poses.
Beyond that fence reside the nuns a whole nun condo, two stories tall and eggshell blue. The nuns were there before we came. I had imagined uncanny habits with shadows inside them, but these are chill, back-to-the-land nuns. Sometimes I see their lights at night, the mellow, anonymous squares of their windows.
The woman says, "You wait right here; I'll be right back." I wait for Sebastian to turn, but he lingers, enraptured. I can see the tense shape of his young, restive body, the chicken wings flexing beneath his slight shoulders.
"Stand back," says the sister when she returns. There's a whirring. A circle in the wooden fence, roughly the size of a baseball, drops out of sight. The saw blade retreats from the circle.
This story is from the February 2023 edition of Reader's Digest India.
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This story is from the February 2023 edition of Reader's Digest India.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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