Moonlight

Photo courtesy of Pix Web on Flickr

2 a.m. and suddenly I'm wide awake. I feel in the dark for my glasses and creep on silent feet to the kitchen. No need to flip any switches. The soft glow of moonlight illuminates the kitchen, the patio and the garden beyond. I step outside and see that last night’s full moon is alive and well and riding high, a buttery blur in the humid, navy blue air. I hear a quail calling from the bushes. The air vibrates with the steady beat of insect music.

I have such an easy life, so much to be grateful for, the sudden, overwhelming sadness that woke me seems churlish, but sometimes, the other side, the downside, the things I try to jolly my way through in the daylight, will be acknowledged, usually like this, in the depths and the lonliness of the night.

It’s almost seen as an offense to be sad in America. There must be a cure for it, a therapist who’ll talk you through it, or a pill you can take, though, in recent months, there’s a lot to be sad about – a lunatic in the white house for one thing, gun violence on some street corner every day, and terrorists trying to blow us all up. And yet, most of the time, I’m cheerful.  My outlook is ninety percent positive. But, once in a while, my optimism gets beaten down. Like now.

My father, whom I adored, died when my first child was barely a year old. I have never gotten over that. How could God, the Universe, take that lovely man, that gentleman of nature, away so that his grandchildren never knew him? I dream of how they’d have loved him, and he them, but he was whisked away at fifty seven. Makes me want to beat something with my fists. But I know in calmer moments that life (or something cruder) happens, death too, and I’m just a speck, railing against forces I barely understand. Didn’t some famous person once say we’re born, we mewl awhile and then we die, and the dust settles over us as though we never were – or words to that effect? Silently I ask my dad to watch over the grandchildren he never knew.

“Do not worry,” the nuns told us, quoting from the bible….

"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?"

 So, most of the time, I don’t. I try not to die a thousand deaths before the real one, except on nights like this when the shadows lie in wait for me under the bed, and pounce when I swing my legs over the edge and grab me by the ankles, as I always feared, as a child, that they would, prompting me to call out to my mother so she could fend them off.

Except now I do battle alone. And when they grab my ankles there’s nothing for it but to go to the kitchen and explain to them that they need to leave – and not come back.

I have my writing pad with me. Quietly I lift a chair into a pool of moonlight and start to write though I can barely see the page. I keep the pen connected to the paper so I‘ll know to move it down a bit with each line. I’ve never written by moonlight before and it makes me smile. It feels as though I'm tapping into energies that would be driven back by artificial light. It’s so peaceful out here, just the moon gleaming on the water, the dark silhouettes of  trees, the occasional bird call, the insistent insect chorus - and me.

My pen falls silent and I just sit. The moon glows. The quail and the insects carry on regardless. God's in His heaven and He knows what He's about. My head and my heart fill with peace. I take my pad and my pen, go back inside and sleep like a baby.