Sitting Here, Hil: Why I Believe in Blogging Even Far From the Capitol

When I woke up this morning I convinced myself for a brief second that I was in my bed in Washington, DC - my green polyester comforter tucked under my chin, my body in its customary sleep positions avoiding my cell phone alarm. I felt my body relax into itself as my mind happily planned its afternoon - after work, maybe I'd stop off at E & 7th, NW to meet Hannah for lunch at Chop't, and then we could walk back to 8th St via Union Station. My legs stretched in front of me, and I wriggled my toes, and I felt a smile seep into my bones as I remembered with fondness that, "I need to put money on my SmarTrip!"

I'm not there, am I? I'm not on 8th St, in Chinatown, or within striking distance of my Starbucks and my morning walk up 16th St, past the National Geographic headquarters, and looping back around to work. I can't walk out my front door in business casual and look remotely like I belong. I can't buy a Chop't salad and I can't walk to Union Station and my body and mind are constantly fighting over the reality of being in Massachusetts.

I am here. My body, however unwilling, lives in Massachusetts now, in Beantown and Newburyport and clam chowder and real Dunkin' Donuts coffee. And my mind lives in Massachusetts, in Christian Theology and American Christianity classes, in TAing, in applying to scholarships and turning my mind around the prospect of graduate schools.

I am continuing to blog this next semester, and hopefully into the future, because I have this wriggling, uncontrollable hope that I can bring the person I became in sight of the Capitol building to Massachusetts with me, and to countries and cities and people beyond Massachusetts when I launch myself into the world.

New Year's resolutions have never lasted beyond the customary three days with me. Resolutions to eat healthier, run more, study early in the morning and the all-important, 'Go slower!' have never made it out past the starting gate. But this year, I am giving those resolutions a bit of a breather. I'm resolved to live fully where I am. I'm resolved to sit here and love here, and blog about here. I'm resolved to write about the world that I see in front of me, and learn about it, and sweep myself up in it. Ann, who writes a blog called A Holy Experience, is teaching me how to see God in small things. Lisa-Jo, who you've all heard about before, is teaching me to rejoice and question and run after Him by writing about the ordinary moments. And both women write for (in)Courage, where I know I will spend much of my 2011 searching for wise words.

Blogs are funny things. You write and every few words wonder, "will anyone actually read this?" And then you hit "Publish Post" and think, "why did I just write that?" And I won't always know the answers. But I do know that here, in Massachusetts, I can see sun shining, and people laughing, and snow falling - and I want to write about it. I can hear poetry echo around my mind, and I want to share it. I can hear questions knock on the door of my heart and I want to ask them out loud, ask them to hear them sounded out and to see them on the page - hoping, of course, that others can point the way to an answer.

Readers, as you think about the arrival of the new year, I hope your resolution includes something that brings you joy and helps you see the world in a new way. I hope you resolve to enjoy, and weather storms, and love deeply. And while you're at it, resolve with me to imagine and remember the places you love, and the people in it, and the wonderful and difficult things that have happened along the way.

Love,
Hilary

All My Love (A Sojourn Into My Grandparents' Love Story)

My dearest honey.


Where have letters gone? My mother's father, my grandfather, penned those three words into every yellowing page of his love. I paged through them this afternoon, as I sat in his easy chair on Magoun Avenue, marveling at the volume of ink I held in my hands. Where have letters gone? When do we pause in the midst of our days to uncap a pen and shower some blue-black love on another person? Where have we put stationary, stamps, envelopes - these hallmarks of time and thoughtfulness? 


Now we email, we "chat" until our fingers fall off from typing, we skype and call and text. We have bound ourselves to each other by an umbilical cord of technology, and parents and children are too afraid to cut this second cord, this connectedness. We don't remember how to write letters to each other, how to hold someone up to the light and examine them, see how light catches a little corner of their heart just so when we remember how they smiled at us on the walk between 8th St and Eastern Market, arms linked... We have forgotten how to write this down in letters, and send our love in bins through postal trucks and mail bags. 


And today I discovered what we are all missing. I have fallen into love, into the warmth of my grandmother’s 1943 diary, and the letters she's carefully preserved in binders. Her careful script records weather, the rush of 20 year old mind and heart, quickening at a letter in the mailbox from Theron, despondent when he sends back all the letters she wrote him during their first few months apart. “I guess he’s quitting me,” she writes, and I am crushed with her, though I know this same boy will be her husband in five years, be her true sweetheart for the next sixty-three years until he dies. She sounds exactly like me and nothing like me, her cursive a far cry from my Arial font on this blog, the pace of her life a meander rather than my usual sprint. But our hearts wander similar paths, long for love and romance, long for adventure, for the fullness of life to arrive. And I read my own words and phrases woven within hers, words I've inherited unknowingly - "awfully" and "heart" and "long for."

I sit and breathe the dust of their love story, and I look over at my grandmother, her face crinkled in memory, with the effort of remembering the joy and marrying it to the new sorrow, to his death, his departure, and her remaining. I see tears mirroring my own as we smell together the room where life was built between them, as she pages through love letters he wrote her for years. “My dearest honey.” “All my love.” I didn’t know I got this phrase from Grandpa when I started signing my letters with “All my love, Hilary.” I thought it was original, unique, something to be cherished because I had come up with it all on my own. I give others all my love, and now I realize that I am his echo, he who gave Grammy all his love, for years and for life. He gave her all his love.

They lived between gulfs of war and the distance from Kentucky to Chicago, lived among two kids in this one story house in Indiana, among the neighbors and snowstorms and Sundays in church and Christmases at the cousins’ two streets over. They lived their love in the most extraordinarily ordinary things. His trucker caps are still kept on their pegs on the porch, her embroidery still hangs in the kitchen and the living room. I can hear their conversations about the Cubs, about the Van Til grocery store and the neighbor’s rambunctious daughters. I hear the promise of their love.

In selfish moments I envy their love story, its beginning at seventeen and how they lived it until Grandpa died. I miss him everyday, and my missing grows into funny shapes and fill places in my heart I didn’t know existed before. If there is one person who I would want to meet a boyfriend (should I ever have one), it would be Grandpa. He would know, immediately, if I was barking up the wrong tree or if this was the real thing. After all, he used to say one of his only regrets in life was not marrying his dearest honey sooner. And I believe him. And sometimes the realization that Grandpa won’t see me get married wells up inside me like a hurricane and I wonder how I can bear his absence.

But as I hide myself in my grandmother’s scribbled words, and hear of her deep love for her boyfriend, my grandfather, as I crawl into her thoughts and root around her twenty year old heart, I realize that this story is part of my lifeblood, part of my dreams of love, part of my own story. My grandparents lived the kind of great love that I hope to have someday; my grandparents who lived life’s mess and loved each other through and despite it. My grandparents are roots of love for me, and I know that as their story seeps into my skin, just as the smell of Grammy’s perfume seeps into my blue jeans, I plant myself firmly in the ground of their love story, and settle for nothing less than the ordinary miracle it is. 

All my love,

Hilary

In the Bleak Midwinter: Blizzards, Solos and Double Chocolate Cookies

I skitter up to the praise band equipment as the Peace is ending (where we greet one another in our church and say, "the Peace of the Lord be always with you"). I am singing a solo at the Offertory and my knees are knocking together under my corduroy skirt that I've kept since sophomore year of high school. It isn't that I'm singing, or that I am singing alone (which is usually pretty intimidating) - it's just my age-old, gut reaction to standing in front of people and performing. 

It goes back to theater my junior year when I was Cinderella in a production of Cinderella. I knew all my lines at least a month before the curtain came up - but I remember my stomach tying itself into sailor's knots before my every entrance. Or when I gave a presentation in an all-school meeting about Hurricane Katrina. I knew my facts, knew which slides to press and when, and still felt fear rise up into my throat and tickle my vocal chords until ten minutes had passed and I was able to croak out the words about failed levy systems and where breaches were strategically placed.

I know the time is arriving as Fr. Roberts opens his mouth and out come the words, "Let us walk in love as Christ loved us, and gave Himself for us in offering and sacrifice to God." And I look over at the pianist, and she smiles and presses the first few notes on the keyboard - and the song has begun. 

And then grace.

I am amazed to find that, rather than warbling through my first verse, my voice rings clear and echoing through the congregation. I close my eyes. These words are not ones to be read off a sheet of paper like statistics reports, but they should be sung with a full heart that's waiting to receive God into her. And so I sing, and sing and sing. And I realize it's not just my mezzo-soprano voice that's reaching into the pews, and sitting among the fuzzy sweaters and wool mittens. It's the voice of Someone inside me, ringing out much clearer and on key, strengthening my knocking knees and my feeble voice and helping me sing to Him all the things I most want to say and never have the words to say. 

There is a blizzard howling outside our windows on Sunday evening and I can hear the wind rattle windows all around our house. I sit on the couch with my mom, drinking Earl Grey tea, talking about life. My brother is baking Double Chocolate cookies from a Betty Crocker mix and the sounds of soccer waft from the living room into the fireplace room where I sit. Life is filled with simple things: infinite cups of tea around the wood stove, the black lab snoozing and the grey cat surveying the scene from her perch on the arm of the red chair, baking from a mix, snow whirling through the night sky, family. I most want to give thanks for these things. I most want to sing about these things, these deceptively small things, that in turn are the greatest things. 

And so grace. 

What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part. But what I can, I give him, give my heart. 

These are the words He helps me sing - and in turn I give Him our double chocolate cookies, our tea, our moments of fire and warmth and family. I give my heart. 

Love,

Hilary