The Virgin Mary, Garbage Collection, and a Black Cat

I lived on Burgundy Street. Let’s start knowing how to pronounce that. It is Bur-GUN-dy not BUR-gun-dy. This makes complete sense once you remember that the city was controlled by the French for ages and the original name of the street was bourgogne. The spelling was Anglicized, but the accent remained.

I lived in half a house. No, I didn’t share a house. It wasn’t a double. It was, literally, half of a house. At some point in the early 1900s a previous owner sold off half the house to a bakery around the corner so that the bakery could have a driveway to the back of its shop where carriages, and later trucks, could pull up to get bread to deliver to shops around town. Eventually, the driveway became the side yard of the house next to mine.

That house was occupied by an older Italian woman, Miss Rita. Miss Rita was a devote Catholic and an even more devote busybody. She was intensely interested in everything that happened on the block, most especially in our house.

Miss Rita’s back door was aligned with our kitchen window, and, if she stood in the door at the top of the steps, she had a clean line of sight into it. Of course, she went out of her way to make it perfectly clear that she would never look in our window. “Oh honey,” she would say in the middle of a conversation that had nothing to do with the doorway or window at all, “you know that I don’t just go looking into other people’s windows. After all, how late you stay up is none of my business.”

I never disputed her claims. That would have been bad form. I learned that quiet listening was the best course of action when it came to Miss Rita.

One of her favorite topics was our weekly garbage collection. To be fair, our garbage collectors were not the neatest, most timely, or nicest people in the city. I fully believe that garbage can tossing was a skill to which they aspired but never mastered.

This didn’t escape Miss Rita’s notice. She would often stop me to complain about the garbage left on the street. I never asked her why she didn’t use garbage bags to help contain the mess. I did go to whatever house our cans landed near, retrieve them, and put them back in our respective yards.

One day I arrived home to find her waiting outside for me. Miss Rita knew the daily schedules of everyone on Burgundy Street. “Oh, honey,” she began. I assumed she was about to launch into a tirade about the trash collection, so I offered to go get the cans and bring them home.

“No honey,” she looked concerned, “you set right here.” She patted the top step of her stoop. People in New Orleans don’t sit. We set, usually on benches, porches, or stoops. “Now I wasn’t looking or anything-”

“Of course not, Miss Rita.” I did my best to look aghast at the very thought.

“Well, the thing is I saw Jeanne this morning just when I stepped out my door to see if that cat of yours was sitting on the Virgin Mary’s head-” I’ll stop her here for a minute to explain that Sable, our black cat, had a habit of using Miss Rita’s Blessed Virgin Mary statue as a convenient stop between the top of our fence and the ground in her yard. I don’t have to tell you that this did not please or amuse Miss Rita.

“and I happened to glance at your window and saw Jeanne swinging from a dark bottle!”

“Really Miss Rita?” It wasn’t really a question. It was more of a stopping point somewhere between a question and a murmur of agreement or understanding.

“Well, the thing is, it was very early. Not even seven yet. I think she might have a problem.”

“Really Miss Rita?”

“Well, I thought you should know.” With that, she launched into her regularly scheduled triad about the garbage collection.

When Jeanne got home that evening, I had dinner ready. While we were eating, I asked her if she had anything she wanted to tell me. She looked completely confused. “No?” she asked.

“Well, Miss Rita said, not that she was looking, that she saw you swigging from a brown bottle before 7am.”

Jeanne turned red. “Well,” she began slowly, “you know how I like Worcestershire Sauce in my eggs, and you don’t use it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I figured that if I like it, and you don’t, it’s mine.”

“That seems fair.”

“Right. So I put some in my scrambled eggs this morning and I figured if the bottle was mine, and you weren’t going to use it, I could take a swig. So I did. I had no idea hat Miss Rita was at her door!”

“At least she isn’t going senile.”

“Yet.”

“She also mentioned Sable and the Virgin Mary again.”

“Nothing to do about that.” Jeanne observed, and she was right.

A version of this story first appeared on Medium.com