Is That What I Think It Is?

My next-door neighbors are Bohemians. She's a secular Jew and he's a lapsed Catholic. So much wasted sacrifice goes on in their house that it kills me sometimes. I don't know if the Carmelites live in as austere a manner as these two do. They almost never turn on the heat. They don't have air conditioning in summer. They recycle everything. On trash day, they put out the equivalent of a paper grocery bag's worth of refuse. They compost and garden and most of what they plant has been dug up at the side of the road or from another willing gardener's patch. They ride their bikes nearly everywhere and finding a parking spot after a trip to the grocery store is never an issue for them because they don't shop. He scoffs at my religious bumper stickers and has made snide comments on occasion about how often I go to Mass. Still, the fact that he even noticed was a start so far as I was concerned.

Not long after we moved in to this house, a house we bought from Jewish friends who moved away, I realized we were living next door to eccentrics. Many is the time she called me to ask me if I was burning a candle. Scents of any kind bother her. She called me up a few years ago to tell me that the scent of laundry emanating from our dryer duct had caused her to become so ill, she couldn't get out of bed all winter. God forbid I would ever clean the bathroom with PineSol. For awhile, she tried to dictate what went on in my house. The minute any scent wafted over her way, the phone would ring. You can imagine what would happen when I burned incense. It was not a pleasant way to live, especially since I'm overly-sensitive and uber-scrupulous about not offending or disturbing others.

A few years ago, I was at home alone on a Friday (in the happy days when I didn't work 5 days a week). I was listening to chant and burning some Cantica incense when a barrage of foul language came at me through the wall of the living room. (Oh, the joy of row-home living). I thought perhaps "The Exorcist" was on somewhere in the house, but nope. It was just the neighbor, carrying on in a most frightening manner about the incense. It was a horrible feeling to think that something so innocuous, that, incidentally, the neighbors on the other side of us never noticed, could induce such a reaction. Not knowing what to do, I offered my next novena to St. Therese for my neighbor's intention. I knew she already saw a psychologist on a regular basis and who's to say whether it was helping or not? It certainly wasn't helping me.

That incident was the last time I ever heard a word out of her about the scents coming from my home. That didn't surprise me much, as St. Therese has always helped me in my need. But what I noticed a few months ago did surprise me. I was walking in my door and saw the neighbors had their blinds open. There on their mantle I could clearly see the silhouette of St. Therese. I am not one to ever look into someone's house, but I was sure it was an illusion, so every chance I got, I peered in. Sure enough, it was her, and next to her was a statue of the Sacred Heart. I asked my husband to take a gander the next time he walked by when their blinds were open, and while he saw statues, he didn't know whose statues he was seeing.

Finally, I went straight to the source. I ran into the husband one day as he was going in the front door and I told him I had spied the two statues. He told me had found them while he was cleaning out a house he has been rehabbing for the past 10 years. He thought they were neat, so he put them in his living room. I must admit I was disappointed to learn that he did not know that it was the Little Flower gracing his mantle, but she's there, nonetheless. "They mean nothing to me from a religious standpoint", he told me, "but they're beautiful statues that date back to the 40's or 50's, so I like having them."

Who knows