discovery

So, for the sake of a precious 3-day weekend, 'Columbus Day' was noted yesterday, a time for drawing sailing ships & reciting the old couplet featuring 'the ocean blue.' Folks might give a thought to a bull-headed, courageous navigator, 3 boatloads of sturdy seamen. Awe-fulness unleashed on the vasty wilds & all the people whose people had been living in the 'new world' since who knew when. long time anyway. Were it not for the fact that I need to go write other words than these I'd wax on a bit about a Edith Cavell, 29-year-old Englishwoman who was nursing, spying, doing whatever she knew to do to help the Allies defeat the 'Huns' in the Great War. That included helping some 200 soldiers get out of German-occupied Belgium. Caught, tried, convicted of treason, stood up in front of a firing squad, and on this day, 95 years ago, Nurse Cavell was shot, her soul dispatched into the next world, what you could call the New World as far as any of us mortals would know, never mind that the Blue Beyond had been there all along.