I walked back in time, today, to confront my childhood. Specifically, I went to St Mary’s church, on the hill, overlooking the valley (or at least parts of Crompton.) I was there at the invite of Fr. Doug (priests don’t use their last names anymore, in a presumed move to be more approachable.)

Or they’re in the Witness Protection Plan.

Anyway, I knocked on the door to the Rectory and it was then I realized: All through my youth, I’d never been inside this house.

The Rectory looks tired. Needs a paint job and it could use new carpeting since the current wall-to-wall has felt the footfall of parishioners for years…maybe decades.

It’s absorbed their sorrows… witnessed their pain.

I was there to find out what happened to THE MURAL that used to hang behind the altar….You know, the one I mentioned on Facebook yesterday, the painting many of us grew up with, as we sat in those church benches, responding to the cricket snappers of nuns who told us how to file in or out…when to sit…when to stand, before each of our major religious events from First Communion through Confirmation.

They’d snap the cricket sound (they held in their hands) and we obeyed.

And I thought about it:  There were no cricket sounds for Holy Matrimony (sacrament of “marriage.”)

Perhaps some of us should have had that.

From “In the Shadow of Princes” (a not-yet-released book, about Colleen Kelly Mellor’s childhood in that milltown.) @ColleenMellor #milltownrigirl https://www.facebook.com/ckmellor

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