The shortest days have passed, as has likely a majority of my life.

Each year, despite notions to the contrary, defensive position assumed and hope held aloft like a lantern in the dark, the fleeting sun drains me.

This year has gone famously for my family and me. There’s work — good work that I enjoy, both on the page and off — and we have a new person teetering clumsily about the living room floor to explore. Learn. Fall. Cry. And rise again.

I’m healthier than ever, and we live on a postcard that seems as if it’s a thousand miles from trouble, but only a 20-minute walk from Henderson Center.

My wife is beautiful. Smart and funny. She’s adept at keeping me grounded and engaged. And the rest of my children are thriving, whole and well, snarky and original.

Yet these low winter days seem bleak. We rise before the sun, slip into our thicker clothes, dodge the heavy sheets of rain between house and car, and do our daily duties under a slate gray ceiling that stretches light thin, weakens our shadows and does nothing to burn off yesterday’s stink.

I come from a gene pool fairly rotten with muck, a slimy top layer of mental illness, depression, melancholia, even schizophrenia. I’m familiar with these moods, and like a circus trainer armed with kitchen chair and bullwhip, I manage them as best I can. They snarl and quake at little more than an arm’s length away, most of the time.

But when the dark fog stole settles over these coastal mountains, and the rain slants sideways in the damned wind, my pet tiger snaps its jaws and yet another chair leg flies off into the scrub. That much closer.

When rain water saturates the earth, floods the drains and collapses fresh graves in on themselves, another leg lops off.

When the old woman, cold and alone, writes out the check to bury her addicted granddaughter because no one cared to, then forgets her granddaughter’s name, the tiger chomps that old wooden seat to splinters.

When the guys wrangle with the slosh of mud and sweat, deftly move their backhoes and long-handled shovels among tombstones to fruitlessly keep the soft walls from melting into the collapsing center, tired but enduring, for a service set to start in the morning, I throw what remains at the angry cat, cover my head and wait.

At night, it usually seems, the sun gathers strength from its rest. It may take a day, it may take six weeks, but always — and I mean always — it rallies at some point from its low ebb and emerges from the eastern curb of sky blessed and bright to beat the soggy demons back.

And it’s joy, I believe, at the sun’s return that motivates the barn swallows and song sparrows, eight-legged ne’er-do-wells, even the splaid-legged toad that roosted overnight on my desk, to suddenly explode with life.

And on that suddenly sunny day, I step outside and feel the sun burn away all the settled muck and crust on this heart’s highways. I am resurrected.

Not so the granddaughter. Some winters never end.

But the sun did dry the grass, and the guys — as usual — did work a minor miracle with machinery and hand tools, keeping the walls intact and pumping the grave free of mud and depravity as the family gathered that day to bury her. They grieved, as the sky relented. And sometimes, often even, that’s all we can ask for.

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James Faulk is a writer, cemetery worker, and family man. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com