Loreto

Last month, I did some dreaming, which is rare. My mind kept returning to Our Lady of Loreto, a place I’ve always felt intensely connected to. It may be because 1st–5th grade were some of my happier years of school.

It was a small, boxy building set into a hillside, bordered by trees. It felt hidden away, even though we were less than ten minutes from the heart of the city.

We were taught by the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Catholic congregation of nuns. They had a little house that overlooked the school, and in the spring, we would scramble up there and work in the garden.

I was one of the last classes before they shut down. Like many parochial schools, enrollment was dropping and finances were strained. I remember all of our worksheets being printed on the reverse of flyers, bulletins, and church correspondence. Later, blank paper felt like a luxury. It still does.

Every few years, I would drive to Brookline, pass my old house, and follow the street down to the hollow that held the school. Over time, the windows got darker, the lot cracked and broke, and the grass grew wild. Of course, it had been decades since I’d last been inside, but my dreams carried me through the quiet hallways and into the church, a modest, dusty-red, functional space that had been converted from the gym. I heard the nuns’ footsteps and the heavy swing of the stairwell doors. 

After the second night, I did some quick searching and learned that the building had been demolished two weeks prior. Looking at the pictures of the empty patch has me feeling like I could’ve imagined all of it. Like my time there was a dream entirely.