Where is Your Bookmark? (07/03/2013)

The proverbial "they" say that bad things come in threes.  Death being one of them.  I'm not a particularly superstitious person, but it does seem to be true in my life lately.  In May, I said goodbye to my beloved Riley.  This past month it was my husband's grandmother.  Yesterday it was a coworker.  I have worked in my current office for 8 years now, many of the people working then are the same ones I see at the office still today.  We are close knit and have seen each other through ups and downs.  Our job can be pretty stressful, so it's only natural really.  Sera was one of the people who always had a smile on her face and a hug at the ready.  She was struck by a progressive strain of cancer earlier this year and yesterday she lost the battle.  The mood in the office will be somber, no doubt.  Our hearts are aching.  She was surrounded by family when she died, and for that I am grateful.

The holiday weekend is fast approaching, and along with it my vacation.  While I would have loved to do some traveling this year and take Mouse on her first real vacation, alas, it is not in the cards for us.  Hopefully we will be able to have some fun day trips mixed in among leisurely days at  home or the park.  I am also hoping the temperatures cool down just a tad.

This past weekend was an eventful one.  We drove up to Central California (where it was hot, hot, hot!) to visit my in-laws and attend Grandma Arnold's memorial service.  It was a beautiful service.  She was much loved and respected and definitely will be missed.  Something I only learned about her in recent weeks was that she took a job during World War II repairing autopilots and bombsights.  When she started, she earned 97 cents an hour.  When she left the job, she was making $1.04.  Imagine that.

It seems fitting then that my reading lately has taken me back to World War II.  Over the weekend I read Simon Van Booy's The Illusion of Separateness for an upcoming tour, and now I am reading The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton.

What are you reading right now?

Every Tuesday Diane from Bibliophile By the Sea hosts 

First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where  

participants share the first paragraph (or a few) of a 

book they are reading or thinking about reading soon.

I have yet to read a Kate Morton novel, although I have heard such wonderful things about her books.  The Secret Keeper is my first.  I have only just begun reading, so am not too far in yet.  I can tell right from the start it would be quite different from Simon Van Booy's book in which the author's prose is sparse.  This introduction doesn't offer much in the way of what to expect from the book but it does give the reader a glimpse at the opening setting.

Rural England, a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a summer's day at the start of the 1960's.  The house is unassuming; half-timbered, with white paint peeling gently on the eastern side and clematis scrambling up the plaster.  The chimney pots are steaming, and you know, just by looking, that there's something tasty simmering on the stove top beneath.  It's something in the way the vegetable patch has been laid out, just so, at the back of the house, the proud gleam of the leadlight windows, the careful patching of the roofing tiles.

A rustic fence hems the house, and a wooden gate separates the tame garden from the meadows on either side, the copse beyond.  Through the knotted trees a stream trickles lightly over stones, flitting between sunlight and shadow as it has done for centuries, but it can't be heard from here.  It's too far away.  The house is quite alone, sitting at the end of a long, dusty driveway, invisible from the country lane whose name it shares.

Would you keep reading?

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© 2013, Wendy Runyon of Musings of a Bookish Kitty. All Rights Reserved. If you're reading this on a site other than Musings of a Bookish Kitty or Wendy's feed, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.