Dead Reckoning
"In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds." – Henry David Thoreau "...and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log?" – Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or, The Whale We reckon the times of our lives by significant and insignificant moments, before and after babies are born, after the wedding, before the divorce, before I lost my job, after the drought of 2011, after Daddy died. These moments give us a fix in time so that we can navigate our brief but busy lives on this planet. I thought most of my reckoning moments had passed me. My babies are grown up, I’ve been divorced twice, married the man of my dreams, moved to Australia, moved back fr