Much Ado About Everything

My Fourteenth Year — A Magdalene Laundry Tale.

In December, the wind comes differently, perhaps more forgivingly than at any other time of year. When the nun said I could go home for Christmas, disbelief and hope tangled in my chest like an impenetrable knot. Could I truly leave behind these oppressive shadows of Mount Saint Canice? Could I escape its cold, unyielding walls and find warmth at home, if only for a brief season?

They arrived just before lunch, my grandparents with my father at the wheel. My grandfather was in the back of the car, and my grandmother in the passenger seat, but she quickly noticed my hair’s disarray. A pit stop in Franklin to see grandfather’s preferred barber remedied that. Snip, snip — my hair now “short and tidy,” to grandmother’s approval. I did not care; the wild strands had felt untamed for months.

In the narrowing space between hope and despair, I found myself back in Dover, tethered to an old life I had outgrown, yet so familiar it felt like a second skin. The parochial contours of the town that once shaped me now seemed foreign, overlaid with the ethereal veneer of an old photograph, faded but unforgettably potent.

The next day, I told my grandmother about my time in Mount Saint Canice. My worn clothing spoke volumes — stolen garments replaced by frayed remnants — and I unfolded the narrative of the Magdalene Laundry, my words stumbling over each other. Her eyes, seas of wavering incredulity, hardened into glacial skepticism. “Enough,” she declared…