It’s okay, I don’t have seasonal affective disorder. I actually love the dark times of the year and at this time of day, it has been dark outside for almost two hours. I am inside my house with all of the lights out except screens and various strings of LEDs, white and multi-colored.

I finished the book Horse (Geraldine Brooks) today. I loved this book. It is a fictionalized account of a REAL race horse, Lexington. A REALLY GOOD race horse. You can google him. I didn’t until after I finished the book. Also his trainer and constant companion since his (the stallion’s) birth. Before reading this, I feared that I might have to slog through all kinds of boring details about horse races like which horse was ahead when, ad infinitum. There was very little of that.

Instead, well, I don’t have words or organized thoughts about this but some of the things… Bones/skeletons of many creatures including Lexington’s. Horse racing in our country in the 1850s or so and a lot of slavery related issues plus how Black people are treated even now. Art history. Who knew that painted portraits of thoroughbred race horses is a genre. I certainly didn’t, not that I am well versed in art history. I certainly am not.

Many of the characters in this book are based on real people and horses, at least Lexington the horse was real. The main character is fictionalized. His father was a real person (free Black man) and we know that he had a son (a slave in the book) but no one knows the son’s name or what he did during his life.

The first Brooks book I read was Nine Parts of Desire. It was non-fiction and I read it at the Shores of Gitchee Gumee in the Eagle River Inn on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.

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