A Girl of Mount Saint Ursula

I guess I am waxing nostalgic this season of Advent. After watching the Bells of St. Mary's for the umpteenth time, I got to thinking about my grammar school and high school days at a Catholic School, The Academy of Mount Saint Ursula in the Bronx, an experience that straddled the days of a Bells of St. Mary's type of education to the Post Vatican II days, with its pros and cons. It was hard to watch the place that I grew up in change, I mean change in a physical way, with large parts of the property given over to good, but very different purposes, for the needy elderly, but so different from the seemingly simpler days of pure education in a bucolic oasis. I wanted it to look and be what it always was, and it deeply wounded me to see the comfortable familiar disappear.  Long into my adulthood when I went back, it looked the same. And then it didn't. I haven't quite made my peace with that reality, but one thing I know, it was in large part the Mount that gave me the tools to do well in a world that in every generation has its difficulties and challenges. It was the Ursuline founded Mount Saint Ursula to which I owe much of my life to here. And I cannot, and now realize I do not want to escape the fact that I am a Girl of Mount Saint Ursula.