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Nuns on the Beach: Letters from Kyiv
A Cape May Point Memory
Kyiv, Ukraine May 8, 2022 Mother’s Day and also the Sunday of the Myrrh Bearing Women on the Orthodox Christian calendar. This seems like good timing to talk about nuns on the beach. Yes, literally, nuns on the beach and also around the small village of Cape May Point, New Jersey when I was a kid.
Summer in the 1970’s was very much different for us. We had no phone in our summer place and had to go downstairs to the owners of the house if we needed to use one or to the payphone by the fire station. I can just imagine some people born after that time looking quizzically at how we survived all summer without a phone. Global warming? Never heard of it back in those days. Sometimes in July and August, you needed a windbreaker or even a sweatshirt at night. Cape May Point was surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Delaware Bay on the other. Cool breezes blew through all the time.
On some of the coolest nights, packs of nuns could be seen strolling all though the quiet streets of this small seaside village. My family was Protestant and loosely religious at that, so I didn’t know much about nuns. The kids in my hometown that…
