Page 31 - Demo

had gone down a few hours ago. We tended to eat dinner late, at least compared to other families that I knew. I liked to joke that we were still synced up with the Pacific Time Zone, despite having moved to upstate New York several months ago. Still, it wasn’t so late as for me to expect the level of darkness I was greeted with. Out west, even the midnight hours were illuminated by some combination of lamp and moonlight. Of course, the main reason for this was light pollution. And that’s only going to get worse now. I gritted my teeth at the intrusive thought, shoving my feet the rest of the way into my shoes before jogging the brief trek from the back door to the pole barn. Gingerly, I rolled the large sliding door open, revealing the inky vacuum therein. If the outside was a new level of dark, the inside of the pole barn—or even worse, the big barn—may as well have been an insight into blindness. Reminding myself to man-up, I ventured into the abyss, fumbling around on the near-side wall for what felt like forever before finding the switch. With a faint pop, the room was flooded with light.
One of Dad’s first renovation projects upon arriving here had been retrofitting this barn. Along with the six overhead lights, each of which emitted an orangish glare, there were also now four heavy-duty LED’s equipped to each corner, and their light was noticeably brighter and brought a lot more texture to the space. This adjustment had been made with the specific goal of using this as a base of operations for my baseball training. One of the former owners had used it as a makeshift hockey rink, something betrayed by the barrage of puck-marks left on the drywalls. There was also a faulty tap, supposedly meant to coat the entire floor with a layer of ice in the winter. This would have made