Cotswold Sheep and Benedictine Nuns of Shaw Island

Shaw Island, the San Juan Islands, Washington, 2003.

I traveled to Shaw Island intending to meet the nuns who raised sheep for the wool yarn I had bought a year earlier in Friday Harbor. A quick online search showed that the nuns were a well-known sight at the ferry terminal. Photos showed them operating massive hydraulic ramps that loaded and unloaded passengers and cars from the ferry dock.

I had squeezed in a flight to Seattle from Iowa, where I was immersed in graduate study of textiles and facing preliminary exams. American graduate school retained a whiff of the Medieval university: one make-or-break exam followed years of reading and study. Stressful? Oh, yes. Traveling to meet the nuns and their sheep on Shaw Island seemed as good a way as any to settle my mind before the exams.

My friend Judy and I drove north from Seattle, left our car in Anacortes, and walked onto one of the Washington State ferries. Riding the ferry thrilled me. I had been landlocked in Iowa for two years. Judy and I walked off the ferry at Shaw Island, and a nun wearing a fluorescent orange safety vest over her long brown habit greeted us. We followed her brisk walk to the nearby Little Portion Store.

The nuns had purchased the store in 1976 and named it for the Italian church Portiuncula from the place where St. Francis of Assisi lived and died. The store seemed the only nod to tourism and the practical needs of boaters and the island’s 150 or so year-round residents. Inside were shelves filled with groceries and household items.

“I’m looking for yarn, and I’d like to see the sheep,” I told the nun, who had by then become the shopkeeper. “Last summer in Friday Harbor, I bought wool yarn spun from sheep on Shaw Island. Is your flock nearby?”

“Oh, I am sorry,” she said. “You want the Benedictines. We’re Franciscans. We just run the store and ferry terminal.” How modest. She was one of four Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist, all in their 60s and 70s, who also ran the post office and a preschool, taught computer classes, and directed musical performances.