Tuesday, July 15, 2025

THE POPPIES BLOW





White poppies on a friend’s blog just now set me on one of my little hunts for histories of interesting people—it had me running over the verses of Flanders Field in my head, and looking up some of the last words, I found the poem inscribed in a young woman’s handwriting in her Nurse’s Daybook, and that just captured my heart.

 

Her name was Ella Osborn, and she worked at Mt. Sinai in New York, I believe, before she took  up the flag and volunteered for work right on the front lines in France---they were right under the bombers and felt the wounds and damages of the ordnance, the searing sting of the floating mustard gas, as they stood in their operating rooms or repairing rooms, hands deep in the wounds of soldiers, til sleep almost swept them off their feet.

She copied the poem on pages in and amongst numbers of lost patients, hours at the operating table, and recounting the small simple joys of an outing away from the melee into a town for a bowl of soup.  Her fieldbook/daybook/nurse’s notes held the diary of her days, from her term of service there, January 1918 to April 1919.  A year and some-odd of a Hell no one could imagine.    She wrote once of an unthinkable reprimand:  “I went for a walk but had to come back early to a lecture given by the colonel who gave us quite a raking over, and said in a nice way we would have to come under Army Discipline.”   (I’m trying to imagine what kind of rank and courage and confidence it would take to dare bring reproof to such a group of heroic, dedicated young women as those battlefield nurses).

 

And I just held her to my heart, with the absolute kinship of family tragedy, with my Dad’s two oldest brothers, 5 and 7, dying within a week of each other in the Flu Epidemic of 1918, before Daddy was born.  I spent lots of hours scribing my finger along the grooves of the lettering on their fading small stones, oldest in our family section of the cemetery,  and then such searing pangs as a Mother later, of how in the world my Mammaw made it through that, pregnant with Daddy’s sister born two months after their deaths, and then Daddy’s birth a year later.  Finding her words was a sort of "she was there doing THAT and my family was here in grief over THIS" in a time frame of mutual hardship.

 

Mammaw also lived through a rattlesnake bite in the pea patch when Daddy was a teen---he drove her in their old Ford five miles on dirt roads to the doctor, as his sister held onto her in the back seat.    She “swoll up fit to pop,” but she made it, circling the century and living another fifty-five years until 1987, within months of her 100th birthday.   

 

 I’m delaying lunch to ferret out more on such a hero as Ella Osborn.    I pray her life was a sweet reward for all the sacrifices she made and good she did in those months of unspeakable trials.   And I hope there are poppies where she rests. 

Another reference that came up just now:  Her trip to France and her service there.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/847fad150ae74ff2a8e8e2df09d4a891


Thursday, July 3, 2025

To Soothe the Savage Breast



 For anyone who hasn't seen The Shawshank Redemption, I can from my heart recommend this movie from WAY BACK---I can remember my own modest Mother, whose work ethic was strict and of high resolve, one day when she had gone to lunch and failed to return at her usual five-minutes-to-One to take over so I could go home. She called to say that she had settled in the den at noon with a sandwich and glass of tea, happened upon the first few moments of the movie, and just HAD to see "how it came out."

If you have not experienced this wonderful movie with its perfect cast and gifted actors, plus the absolutely sublime Stephen King writing---DO look it up.
In one of the brightest spots in a grim-spotted movie, of prison and of gray and of the beating-down of the humanity within, there are incandescent moments of LIGHT so bright they feed your soul. My favorite is when Andy Dufresne, convicted of murders he did not commit, had been given the task of administering the prison library.
He took on the small, dim space, with its creaky book-cart of handworn, many-times-read books and its dusty corners, and by writing to organizations and pestering the state legislature with something like a letter-a-week requesting funding, he was finally sent a few boxes of used books and records.

On one particular day, the guard stepped out for a moment, and Andy took out a big old slick black record from its worn sleeve, set it on the turntable, started it playing, and turned on the intercom/public address system for the whole prison---house and yard.

The men elbow-deep in hot laundry suds stopped their labor; the kitchen cooks and the machine shop grease-monkeys and the floor-moppers and the guards all looked up in wonderment as those silvery notes floated out over the gray walls and bare-trodden yard, as if they were seeing the very angels in the air who voiced the melody.

And Red, who was Andy's best friend---a pragmatic old lifer played by Morgan Freeman (imagine that rich, honey-syrup voice narrating the words), says:

"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it.

I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was as if some beautiful bird had flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free."