Current read and rambling ruminations

Tasty bison burgers for dinner. Made some tip money. Tourists are coming out in full force. The cold is starting to feel like it will never lift. It will of course. If we're lucky maybe we'll get a week of spring before the temperatures shoot up into the 90s. Honestly though, I'm looking forward to the heat.

I'm reading The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin. A mystery story set in Moscow and London in 1876 featuring a charmingly fresh-faced detective named Erast Fandorin, it remains gently humorous while never quite letting go of a hard edge that runs throughout. Rather than being stomped on by superiors when he has an original idea he is encouraged to investigate on his own. They figure it will do him good. This is a nice change of pace from investigators forced to go rogue and work on their own in order to see justice done. Erast Petrovich is such a babe in the woods at times but this naivety seems to work for him, disarming those he's spying on. He's so without guile it's impossible to imagine that he's hiding anything. The plot is moving along at a nice pace. I think I'll keep Akunin on my list of authors to read.

And now for rambling writing time because I want to.

It's rare in the suburbs to experience true darkness at night. There's so much light pollution that the sky glows deep purple even at 2:00 a.m. When I was little however, the small town where our vacation home is had far fewer streetlights and it was possible to wake up to blackness like a veil. I would open my eyes real wide, turn my head towards the windows searching for just a little light to anchor me. Deprived of my sight I would feel almost trapped, incapable of something so simple that during the day I never even thought about it. My sister was sleeping in the next bed over but she may as well have been on a separate island. The outside world would be reduced to the sound of a train whistle coming from down the block and across the road. Then I would think about ghost trains rushing by in the night, passengers dark and dim in the windows with wide mouths and holes for eyes, fingers pressed against the glass. It always seemed to me that traveling was for the daytime and that deep dark was reserved for the others that came out after. The unknown is populated by the things we cannot see. It's one thing to be unable to see you own hand right in front of your face but something else to not notice the hand reaching out for you.