orders past when the topic of faith comes up, she'll joke how she was the last hope of a generation of women. since sometime in the late nineteenth century, each generation at least one daughter of the family would pack her bags and move thousands of kilometers to take up holy orders and become a nun. they traded the worldly struggles to till a livelihood from the unforgiving rocks of the canadian shield, to birth and raise a new generation as poor as the soil beneath their feet, for the freedom of a full education and a life of prayer and service. instead of tending the kitchen garden, they'd tend their families souls from afar through daily prayers. that is, until her generation. "you know, when we let the forest have the land back and accepted that the city wasn't a pit of sin life got better. it's not a life in the world or an education anymore. we realized we can have both. i don't need the freedom of the orders." the old sisters (the youngest now in her mid-seventies) remind her it's not too late. they pray for all the women in the family through pregnancy and childbirth, adding an addendum that perhaps if she won't come, maybe she'll give them a little sister one day, who'll look at the fallen world and see the light of service and prayer as a way to help her family. before the order is extinct. 220418 what's it to you? who go blather from