This cold week of February is the time for chocolates, sweets and wearing the color red. Red is a warm color, full of life that shouts to be noticed.

All I want to see and wear is color after these long, drab cold weeks of winter. The color red reminds me of when my brother-in-law Edgar fell in love with my sister Geraldine when she was wearing red.

Geraldine was a Maryknoll nun for almost 10 years. She wore a long gray nun's habit with a white collar and a long nun's veil with a strip of white at her forehead for the first five years. Geraldine told me that when she entered the convent she never saw her reflection, until one day she was cleaning the chapel and in a large glass door she caught a glimpse of herself for the first time in a year. She wanted to stare at herself longer but she knew this was frowned on. Later on after Vatican 11, her nun's garment changed to calf length, solid gray skirts and white blouses and a gray shoulder length veil. Geraldine had entered the convent at age 19.

She was a young woman just coming on to her sexuality when she went through this period of wearing unnoticeable gray and white colors. Nuns were not supposed to draw attention to their looks and dressed as nondescript as possible.

The Maryknolls were missionaries and Geraldine went to school to learn Spanish. She was sent to do mission work in Panama at the poorest parish called Chorillo. After two years in Panama, Geraldine returned to the

States to get her degree at Mary Rogers College in Maryknoll, N.Y. She came home for a visit before she went to New York. I hadn't seen her in two years. I was 16 years old and Geraldine was now 27. She was wearing a pink suit and her head was bare. Her thick black hair was shoulder length and she was very pretty and had changed into a vibrant, confident woman. It was so different to see Geraldine this way after years of seeing her dressed in dark mysterious nun garb. She was at ease with herself and more approachable. Before when she came home for visits she wouldn't speak to me or my brothers and sisters but kept to herself and read romantic novels late into the night. My mother would get her up early to go to mass and then they spent their days driving around visiting relatives. This visit, Geraldine spent time with my sisters and me. She asked me to come to see her in Nicaragua the following summer.

I worked at a fast food restaurant my junior year of high school to raise money for the trip. For two weeks in June my sister, Mary and I picked strawberries from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. to make money to go to Nicaragua. We really didn't know where we were headed but we took buses all the way to Nicaragua. The story of our trip is some tale, which I'm not going to get into right now.

In Nicaragua, Geraldine lived with five other nuns and they all had jobs. Geraldine did social work in Managua at an agency and she went on assignments with two men, Manuel and Edgar. Geraldine would take turns taking Mary and me to work with her.

The men liked Geraldine. She was getting noticed for the first time in her life. She started to borrow clothes from Mary and me. She had white alabaster skin and dark, dark hair and she looked great in red. One day when

Mary was with Geraldine, Edgar couldn't take his eyes off her. She was wearing a red blouse and her dark hair was tied back with a red scarf. Mary said that Edgar stared at Geraldine, sucked in his breath and said, "Rojo, rojo. Aye-yi-yi."

Geraldine left the convent shortly after and married Edgar. They had two daughters Alana and Genevieve. This weekend their daughter, Alana is getting married in Dallas and I am going to her wedding. Geraldine died of cancer in 1992 and I will wear red this week in her memory.

Sheila Donnelly can be reached at 434-2233 or by e-mail at :mailto:newsroom@austindailyherald.com