Let’s not forget Moina Belle Michael’s lasting contribution to Memorial Day.

She was born just after the Civil War in 1869, in Good Hope, Georgia, about 60 miles east of Atlanta, the second of seven children of John Marion Michael and Alice Sherwood, both parents descended from wealthy cotton farmers of French Huguenot ancestry — pedigree still counted for something in the Deep South, even though her family sold the plantation in 1898.

Michael grew up to be a scholar and a teacher, first in her hometown, then at teaching schools in Athens, Ga., before moving to New York City in 1912 to study at Columbia University.

It was during a trip to Europe in the summer of 1914 that World War I erupted. In Germany at the time, Michael fled to Rome, where she was credited with helping 12,000 American tourists seek safe passage back to the United States.

Eventually she arranged her own passage, returning to a new job as a professor at the University of Georgia. But when the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, Michael took a leave of absence and volunteered to train overseas YWCA workers in New York. And when the war ceased, she returned to the classroom, this time to teach a class of disabled servicemen.

These are the most noble of acts, but Michael’ greater virtue stems from another: her devotion to the poppy as a symbol of remembrance for those who served in war.

A Canadian army officer, John McCrae, wrote a poem after the funeral for a fellow soldier who had died in combat in 1915. McCrae threw away the poem, but another solder retrieved it, and encouraged him to have it published. The poem, “In Flanders Fields” first appeared in the British magazine Punch in December 2015. It was one of the most popular wartime verses ever published.

The poem so inspired Michael that the Georgia professor resolved to wear a poppy every day in honor of fallen soldiers. It was her original idea to make and sell miniature silk replicas of the flower to raise money for veterans aid — a custom that caught on and endures with veterans organizations nationwide. The flower also is widely associated with Remembrance Day throughout the Commonwealth Nations of the former British Empire — which coincides with the American observance of Veterans Day on Nov. 11.

If there is a grain of essence in Professor Michael’s contribution to patriotic posterity — and who could deny that does — we believe it is this: she took ownership of a sense of community. She carved out a vital role for herself to play where none existed — and the heroic role she created made all the difference.

Michael’s view of the war was at once exceedingly internal and external — peering into the past and future, she could see how bloodshed and geopolitical posturing would affect her life and that of her community and country — and how her own gestures might make a difference. She understood the principle of butterfly effect long before anyone had even theorized what the butterfly effect might be.

That alone should inspire the rest of us. Don’t undersell the nobility of a good deed, a kind word or even a moment of prayer, no matter how insignificant it might seem at the time.

The world would be a different place if that Canadian soldier hadn’t retrieved John McCrae’s discarded poem after a funeral in 2015.

— TAH