So Many Forgotten Islands

    I like to think of our planet and things in it and across it sometimes. It mostly has to do with features and places and peoples on the surface. Not too much the underwater seas and all that, or the subterranean caves, tectonic plates, and deeper recesses towards the core.

    I have maps of many places; sometimes I love them and peruse them. Each person, each family, each community is its own island unto itself. This is socio-cultural.

    Physically in our world, on the surface, we have so many islands in and around the seven (or six) continents and the major oceans. So many! Many are inhabited, and we forget about them, or never recognize them. Some are far flung departments of greater nations, like France or Britain, Belgium or the Netherlands. Others are independent. Each sea and ocean has its tremendous share. 

    I have been to small handful. There are many inland islands, too, meaning freshwater lakes and inlets have bodies of land surrounded by water. Rivers have islands.

    Hemingway has a posthumous book, Islands in the Stream, where the story ends up among islands of Cuba where the main characters are hunting Germans. Perhaps no humans live in those places, still.

    There are a hundred islands in almost any quadrant of the region of a good sized map that you look at.

    Have you see any? Do you know the biggest ones of northern Canada, like Ellesmere, or Brooks, or ... or ... the ones that ends with "ton"? I usually try to memorize these. Wellington? Effington? Baffin! Yes, Baffin Island.

    There are the Micronesian Islands, and so many more.

    I have rarely learned some, but on occasion tried to memorize or recognize, but mostly I have forgotten them.

    There are celestial bodies out there, outside our planet. Save those for another day.

    Thinking about the water-islands on just this planet...