Dear Mago,
As I turn off the lights this evening, and gaze out my window, I can see the three stars of Orion’s belt. They offer my vessel a source of orientation, and reassure me that you are out there too, anchored in the same mythology.
The site of Orion’s belt also reminds me of a new navigational concept that I learned just this last week in my work for the Swedish Maritime Museums: dead reckoning. The human being has apparently long estimated her current position relative to her previously determined position, known speed, elapsed time, and course. While dead reckoning is thought to be a misunderstanding of deduced reckoning, historical (Elizabethan) documents tell us that navigation is ”live” when it takes into account the regular movements of the stars and the orbit of mother Earth, but ”dead ” when it does not. Regardless of our (b)logs, compasses and clocks , without our bright and familiar celestial references – such as Orion, Leo, Scorpius and Crux – our reckoning is ”dead”.
Thanks for being with me in the darkness of this night.
Your devoted granddaughter
ps. 4.46 a.m. CET. Unfortunately, I didn't reckon with a full moon and the threat of lunacy that is circling o'er head in cyberspace. Reading well-crafted tales is my solace. May I soon be succored by the daylight.
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A diary inspired by excerpts from a diary written by my grandmother, Edith Gertrude Kreigh (1886-1977), an American mother with children on both fronts during World War II. Excerpts (in bold print)were written mostly in the spring of 1942, and published here on the same days of the year as original entries, 65 years later. All other texts are by Sue Anne Moody (1947-).
Copyright © Sue Anne Moody
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