For the information of my relatives and friends, the Carmelite nuns are no longer in the Monastery on Newberg Road in Louisville, Kentucky. Back in the days when they lived there, I would quite often visit the barrel in their front hallway to request prayers for a special petition or on occasion to take them a head of cabbage or some other vegetable that I had grown in my garden. They lived downhill from my house and I could almost see their home from my back kitchen window.
I would stop on my way to art class with my requests. I treasure a small note from the sisters that I received after one of those visits when I gave them a small Nativity statue pf Mary and her Infant Son that I had made.
When I was a small child, the Carmelite Monastery was located in Downtown Louisville, and on occasion, our Mother went there for prayers. It must have been during summer because we were not attending our grade school classes and were accompanying her.
It was during one visit that I remember thinking, “Yes! It would be a good thing to become a nun and pray for people all day! Prayers must work. Mother was asking for them! And a Carmelite was as good a nun as any. as Mother was visiting them.”
This fixation with becoming a holy, praying Carmelite nun remained with me until whenever I received my rude awakening of discovering that Carmelite nuns did not talk to anyone in the public sector. Pray they did. Talk they could not. And talking was something I liked to do along with praying.
At any rate, since I have considered them to have a “Zip Code To Heaven, I have always felt a close bond with them and will miss them as my downhill neighbors.