David McElroy

I should be asleep now. It’s 1 a.m. and I’m exhausted. I slept only about four hours last night. Wednesday was a long and exhausting day, made longer by my lack of sleep.

But I’m sitting in the silent darkness of my front yard, watching clouds move across the night sky, creating endless patterns above the dark tree branches above me. One moment the sky is clear and the full moon is bright. The next moment, the clouds mute the light and diffuse its brightness like a giant sheet in the sky.

This is my favorite time of day. There are no people around. No ringing phones. Nobody who needs something from me. Everything seems clear. Life makes more sense.

In this peaceful stillness, I am the closest I come to being joyful and happy these days. My feelings and thoughts turn to a future which seems just barely out of reach. And I always think of her.

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The weather’s been miserable here. We went through a bitterly cold period a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had a couple of other times when strong storms came through, thrashing us with heavy wind and deluging us with rain. By southern standards, it’s been a bad winter.

All the trees around my house look bare and lifeless. My back yard is littered with limbs and branches that I haven’t yet cleared away, debris from a couple of the recent storms. There’s one large tree branch — the one you see above — that crashed down one evening so close that it almost hit my house.

I was in the back yard Sunday afternoon looking at all the debris and the bare trees when I realized that what I was looking at matched the sour mood I’ve been feeling. It seems as though my heart has been experiencing winter for a long time. And then I remembered a simple question from an old song.

“Can you stand the weather — if winter lasts forever?”

And I don’t know how much more winter my heart can stand.

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