(Revised and expanded upon from a Facebook Post)

Dear Friends,

Since shortly after the riots in Charlottesville, and with the Wheel of the Seasons turning towards October and Samhain, I’ve been looking at this bottle a lot this week-end.

It came down to me from my Mother, who got it from my Great Aunt Lois. Lois picked it up in Egypt during WWII. What was my Irish American Great Aunt doing in Egypt you may ask? Working for the OSS (the Wartime forerunner of the CIA)  or so the story goes.

One time when my mother and older brother were visiting her, in the early 1980’s, Lois received one of her letters from the CIA. She received these every once in a while, basically telling her that she could now speak about her activities from such and such a date to another, as the information had been declassified.

The one mission I know something about involved sneaking onto a Nazi occupied air-field and spreading caltrops to destroy the tires and hopefully sabotage and crash Nazi planes.

Now I face the reality that a young woman died, was murdered,  in Charlottesville  standing against Nazi’s and White Supremacy on U.S. soil. At the same time as a realist and someone who is reasonably historically informed, I know that she was hardly the first to be killed by Nazi’s or White Supremacists on U.S. soil in history, or even in my lifetime, perhaps not even the first this month.

Holy Mother in Whom we live, move, and have our being;
Holy Father Who lives, moves, and has being in every atom, every cell, and every soul;
Help me, please, I pray, in whatever way I may,
Contribute to the world in such a way,
That she is one of the last.