Chapter One

Chapter One
Making Waves in Kansas

Toting a small hoe and pruning sheers, Sister Agatha Grosdidier crept her way along the flower beds straddling the massive stone Ursuline convent in Paola, Kansas, bending to paw the earth and clip a useless twig. She was lean and large boned with a broad, handsome face. A plain black head covering that fell back to the nape of her neck-a veil-was the only outward sign that she was a nun. The profusion of roses, irises, tulips, jonquils, wild sweet Williams, poppies, bluebells, and tiger lilies, among others, was her doing. Her love of tending flowers dated back to her childhood spent on a Kansas farm. It was a passion that she later saw as helping her to nurture children in the classroom.

When she wasn't digging in the dirt, Sister Grosdidier answered the convent phone or sewed aprons. In 1995, she was ninety-five years old, the eldest of the sisters. For nearly seventy-five of those years, she had been an Ursuline sister in Paola, a farming town forty miles south of Kansas City. Her chronology coincided remarkably with the history of the sisters' community. She was born five years after the Paola community's founding by thirteen nuns and three postulants, or trainees, and had lived to celebrate its hundredth anniversary in 1995.

Sister Grosdidier was the kind of sturdy survivor who attracts accolades such as "remarkable" or "awesome." She was astonishingly robust, with a sparkle still dancing in her eyes. Her health had been so resilient that an insurance man, noting that no claims had been filed under her name, called the convent to ask if Sister Agatha was still alive. She loved tacos, spicy foods, and c