Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: The Beast Inside You

This is a year for advice (Dear Sugars, especially), and for finding the voice that sounds inside me, for the letters I have to write to find the truth. I am linking up with Joy's life: unmasked today. I'm unmasking the only way I know how: in letters. 


Dear Hilary, 


I feel sick to my stomach. Not the cute, butterflies anticipation heady something really cool is about to happen sick. No, I mean the on the floor, doubled over, why won't this end and I hope I don't throw up all over this airport floor sick. I write to you because my plane just landed back at home, after a trip to a city that I love, and I am a mess. I want to cry, or rage, or yell at my innocent family members, or throw up. What's wrong with me? Why does this happen? 


Love,
Travel-Weary


Dear TW, 


If I were a doctor, instead of a voice out in cyberspace and heart-space trying to sort out life, I would tell you to rest easy, take some antacid and close your eyes. I would tell you that you might have inner ear balance problems, and so flying might not be a good idea, or I might dash off my signature on an order for a blood test or a CAT scan or an MRI. Just to be on the safe side. 


But as this voice in cyber//heart space, I'm going to tell you that you are homesick. How the hell can you be homesick if you're at home? I can hear you rage at me too as this terrifying and unknown thing leaps out of you determined to cry and attack and mourn as soon as the plane lands. That's the beast of homesickness. It's curled up inside you, and when you leave the place you love, it wakes up. 


Do not be afraid of the beast inside you. 


Like all of the beasts and dragons and beautiful heroes and scientists and painters who live inside us, homesickness is a part of you. You didn't "catch it" from someone or somewhere. You haven't lost your mind, or been temporarily taken over by hostile forces. You are just deep in love with somewhere you have to leave. You are just exploring the edges of yourself rubbed raw by that love. 


Who doesn't rage a little bit when they leave their heart in Kampala, Uganda? Who doesn't cry and shoot get-out-of-here looks at their family when they've knelt on the ground outside St. Peter's Basilica and asked only to stay a little longer, only to stay forever, and had to depart? Who doesn't double over wanting to throw up when the plane or the train or the car screeches to a halt, and we realize we can't go home, to that home, for another ten months or years or half a century? 


There is not a day that goes by where I don't think about the places I've left. They flash before me in journals and photo albums and names of foods and strange memories of kayaking or drinking cappuccino in a cold kitchen or the look on my friend's face when she hears me talk about mornings at Eastern Market. The beast inside me can be mean, and angry, and so deeply disappointed you can measure it on my face when I come back. And when I double over, TW, like you, clutching my stomach - I think something is seriously wrong with me, too. 


But it isn't, love, it isn't. We are rubbed raw by love and we ache with leaving. Our bodies want to remind us. Our bodies wants to help us embrace the beast, and keep on loving the places that bend our hearts.


If I were you, I would keep that seemingly terrifying beast inside you. Stay deep in love with the places you leave, raw at your edges, aching and hopeful. 


Love,
Hilary

I come home again (thanksgiving)

The wind picks up, spinning the leaves in a tornado on the pavement, the sun beams out from in between the buildings. My sneakers, still covered in Chebacco Lake and Essex St. mud, carry me down F St, dart right and then right again, and then, spread out before me...

Home.

I feel the pavement beneath my feet and the cold air in my lungs, and I feel all the things that have happened in this long year since I have watched the buildings rise in front of me and passed Pitango, and Red Velvet, and 1615 L St, and the National Press Building, and that church on that corner and the street I passed every morning on the way to work.


This year, I turned 21, learned to be homesick for a city I love, learned to plant my heart in Italy in just ten short days. I learned something about awful obedience and courage. I learned something about love.


The traffic has been stopped on Pennsylvania Ave, so I take a chance and dash across the street to the Newseum, its clean glass giving me a bit of a reflection of this redhead running with the biggest grin on her face.


This year, I wandered through the desert and soaked in the sunshine and tested God and He rained back blessings. He taught me the hard lessons and I learned some of them.


My muscles ache but I push on ahead, straining my eyes to read the signs just one more time. I want to plant the grid of letters and numbers in my mind so deep that crazy New England town maps confuse me. I want to take a picture of all of this so many times that I dream it. 


This year, I laughed and cried and got tired and go reenergized and rocked babies to sleep and wrote papers and letters and fell in love with writing again. And all the while, this place has been waiting for me.

Last year I wrote this on Thanksgiving: 


But sometimes it is okay to bake from the box. Sometimes what we offer to our thanksgiving meal is humbler than we'd like. Sometimes what we offer from our messy hearts and lives is just that... messy, less than perfect, less than what we expect ourselves to be able to offer. And now, returning to this blog post after a wonderful meal and wonderful company, after a brisk 5 mile walk to and from the World War II Memorial (thank you, Hannah, for the wonderful vanilla chai and the company)... I know that it is okay to bake from a box sometimes. It is okay to be less than the perfection we imagine. It is even, in this day, something to be thankful for. 

So give thanks, whoever you are, wherever you are - give thanks as wholeheartedly and messily as you can. Bake from a box. Sing a song off-key. Write a letter and smudge the ink on the envelope. Drink tea and read a good book, call a friend. Give thanks for the mess, for the growing. 



As I turned the corner to climb the last few steps before looking at the Capitol, and then turned to run back down Pennsylvania, and took my hair out of its tight ponytail and let it blow in the breeze, I realized that all this life is mess and growing and there is nothing more beautiful.  


Love, always, from the city, 
Hilary

Because sometimes home is not a street address

The engine grinds to a halt and we wheel across the tarmac. The lights wink at me from behind the thick plane window and my stomach does a running roundoff cartwheel like the ones my sister and I used to do in the backyard.

I have come home.

(photo: hannah byrnes)

It's not where I grew up.

It's not where I live now.

It's not where the letters come and go, or where I curl up in sweaters as October slowly fades into November and it's not where I drink tea late at night while dreaming story ideas and whispering questions.

Washington, DC is the city where I spent four months and found my heart. It's the place where I held out my hands, opened from seasons of exhaustion and uncertainty, and suddenly, God filled them with love and friendship and joy. It's the city where I learned that sometimes, all that He wants for you to do is turn to Him and say, "It's marvelous!"

There are always these places, even for those of us who wander in and out of homes and down empty alleys and across marshes full of mud. There are always places where the wind picks up and the air changes to smell like harvest and we are suddenly full to overflowing, suddenly bright and beaming.

I hold this place tight in my chest, and as we drive past the Capitol Building glowing against the black sky, something inside me shouts out - "Welcome back, Hilary!"

We never leave the places we love - we carry them with us. We carry them in our heart. 

I have come home to the place I found Him.

Sometimes, home is not a street address.

(photo: mandie sodoma)

Love,
Hilary

When You Ache for A Place You Love

I've been aching somewhere inside me for Washington, DC. I want it back, my feet on those broken brick sidewalks, watching leaves fall in Lincoln Park, eating cupcakes (there were so many of those) and drinking cappuccinos while reading about policy. I am straining at every mooring here in Wenham to get back because, as I have written before, there is a piece of my heart that lives in those bustling street corners and remembers the park benches and the apricot iced tea and the walk from the Eastern Market Metro back to 8th St with the people who I never imagined in all my wanderings would become so close.

A year ago I wrote a "quieter" kind of post. A year ago I was learning that the quiet voice is to be treasured and spoken and remembered longer than the loud, indignant voice and the doubtful, questioning voice. I was learning how to speak from my quiet place, how to speak with love, how to love words.

On Sunday, September 26, 2010, I reminded myself that Plato said,  "Poetry is nearer vital truth than history."

And a few days before that I had been regaling you all with the tales of my encounter with the squirrel in Farragut Park before my internship one morning. The squirrels in DC are crazy; this one was out to get me. I remember how I desperately attempted to kick a squirrel away from my bench while writing in a prayer journal and trying to look cute for the parade of cute button-down-wearing, plaid-is-the-best-look-for-fall, messenger-bags-and-loafers guys who walked by. I can close my eyes and picture myself, my elbows flying in multiple directions, my laugh uncontrollable, and the truth that, somehow, in the midst of it all, "I'm marvelous!" singing in the back of my head.

And then the Pink Elephant Shoes come into my life in early October.

And then the almost-presentation at Heritage in our public policy class. Except that we couldn't present because our contact went out of town on business and didn't tell anyone.

And then came the lesson about mercy. The lesson about one step at a time, and learning to fly. The lesson about how even when we are in the midst of beautiful new places and new experiences, when our new self is emerging, in all her laughter and joy and sorrow and confusion - God still has lessons to teach us about Himself.

And then came the lesson about promises. The lesson where God moved into my heart and didn't let go, and how He calmed the storms and moved the mountains and in the midst of it all, how He promised His faithfulness. How He promised His love.

I long for DC today like the desert longs for a hurricane. But those lessons - laughter and poetry and mercy and promise - ring out like bells and remind me that even if my feet only touch the sidewalks between the music building and the science center, even if I look out my window at New England fall sky and pine trees, even if my heart is full of senior thesis and Sara Evans and the smells of September... Still, my heart is growing towards Him. 

Love,
Hilary

Going Home Again (When The Place Has Changed)

Not long ago, I went to Italy. I packed a small suitcase, boarded a plane, landed in Rome. I was there about ten days, and we traveled from our monastery home in Orvieto to Florence (Firenze-Santa-Maria-Novella) to Rome (Roma-Termini). I journaled my way through gelato afternoons and sitting on the edge of the river taking naps, through long train rides and walks around Orvieto hearing church Italian - una colomba and Signore Dio - like so much music.

You can read about a few of my thoughts here and here, my musings about the stars, about the sweetness of life, about the delight we can taste and touch if we are looking.

I have always heard that traveling changes a person. That you leave and the dust of the place sticks in your hair and on your skin. That the place breathes inside your bones, calling on you.

But I think traveling changes places too. Our homes without us in them shift their shapes, grow to expand new people or close in on the empty spaces we left behind. When we go back, we'll find it different. Maybe what we think is all our own glorious transformation is just as much the place we left resettled into a different position.

I imagine Italy is different, now. The hills I think I've captured in my camera have long since tilted a little more towards the setting sun and spilled their real dirt over hundreds of scrambling feet. The ruins gazing up at me in January from hundreds of years away have looked on other faces and moved back towards the dust.

I wonder how much DC has changed while I've been gone. How the streets have been scrubbed clean, again and again, how much rain and humidity and earthquakes they've had. How new restaurants have emerged, how Eastern Market smells, whether or not they still make the hazelnut latte the way I love it at Ebenezer's. I imagine the city has stretched its arms open to new people and that perhaps the small mark I made on it remains, tucked away on the bus or perhaps on the sidewalk of M St in Georgetown where I think I realized what it meant to know and love a place.

Since I began this blog a year ago, I've traveled - to California and back twice, to the District, to Italy, to Pennsylvania, countless times to Gordon. I've traveled in my heart, too, from disappointment to joy to fullness to unanswered questions.


And tonight, at the end of a long (too long) day, and before the beginning of classes tomorrow, I hear all those places bending and stretching towards what is new, and my own heart echoes the same. Because traveling changes us, and our homes. And after this year of journeying, I close my eyes and wonder, what will home look like now? 


Love,
Hilary

Dear District of Columbia,

It's been a wandering semester and half-summer, hasn't it? You have grown, I'm sure, welcoming flocks of people to your monuments, to scuff new sneakers on the sidewalk of your gridded streets. I can see you, just soaking up the swell of summer tourists, beaming out the lights from the Monument over them, watchful and inviting.

I miss you. I whisper it laughing over homemade spring rolls at a dinner party; I pray it driving home from work; I listen to my own mind think it as I run through neighborhood after neighborhood, the long stretches of colonial houses and primly kept gardens and swept driveways. I see the lawnmowers in their journey across the yard and I suddenly, inexplicably, see you: the bustle of 7th St. SE, the grime of Farragut North where the suited men and women emerge and descend. I can see Kramer Books, I can see the little blue house of Anthropologie in Georgetown, and I see Chop't in Chinatown, and the D6 bus with my favorite driver calling out, "Union, Station, Union, Station."

It's been a while since you and I saw each other, and I threw leaves in the air with Mandie, or drank apricot iced tea in Port City Java, or wandered around Farragut Park while talking furiously on the phone to my mother or to my friend... and I haven't forgotten, you know. I carry you with me.

My world here is colored with the smells of freshly cut grass and the innumerable cups of tea that my parents and I drink on the porch with the black lab at our feet. I'm still reading books, I'm studying history (I know, it came out of nowhere and everywhere, didn't it?). I drive to work, and there's not a Metro station in sight. And when I look out into the sky from my window, I can't make out the outline of the Capitol building. I see the sky sprinkled with stars. The air has a new edge to it, cleaner, maybe, or just tasting like summer.

But I keep what you taught me close to my heart: the fact that writing is good, even when it is hard, and this blog, which began just being about me and the coffee shops, the business meetings, about teaching myself to be myself in a new place. I learned the joy of sign language from you (and Virginia, of course). I learned that there is promise in what is unfamiliar and that God listens closer to our hearts than we do. I learned that to be homesick means to know what home is.

You taught me myself. How is that, that places know us before we do? You knew, from the bump of the plane on the tarmac to the last glance backward in the dark of a 5am bus ride to Baltimore, that I was spending time with you so that I could meet myself. And it's hard, I won't lie, to trust that I am still that person who doubled over laughing in the kitchen with Gillian and Rebecca, who walked to the Lincoln with Sam and saw you spread out before us like a map waiting for our footsteps, who did not question the goodness of God.

It's hard because I have my heart stashed somewhere between the Marine Barracks and the White House, on the blue line to GWU/Foggy Bottom, in the quiet hum of traffic outside the building, in the glass and marble office, in all the crevices I caught my high heels on and all the sidewalks I almost tripped over. You hold 600,000 people and innumerable skyscrapers and too many Blackberry devices to count. You bear the weight of wide-eyed wonder and disillusionment, the promise and the price of the powerful, and the small miracles of dog walking in Lincoln Park and boys who scribble in my sketchbook and strangers who smile at me on the street when I look a little downcast.

You hold me.

So, DC, know that I carry you with me, in my bones, in the way that I dress for work and the way that I listen to others and the way that I trust Him. I watch the world with better eyes, and I love the world with a bigger heart.

I'm sitting in Massachusetts miles away from a Peregrine espresso, miles away from the almost-tattoo I got in Adams Morgan, and the cupcakes we ate at DuPont, and the long beautiful walk from L St to Busboys & Poets, and I can hear a kettle singing and the shower running, and so I'll go for now. But thank you for not giving me my whole heart back on December 11. Thank you for carrying it in your streets and monuments, in your marble buildings and elevators, and in the midst of your beautiful chaos.

I'll come back soon, I promise.

Love,
Hilary

God Sends Manna (Learning to Eat)

Today homesickness hit my gut at its morning sleepiness, settling in there like so much sand and gravel. The scene:

I sit in the student center, the side we call "Sunny Side" because of the windows, in my usual chair at my usual table. I sit reviewing notes for the class I have at 9:45, and reviewing other things here and there. And then I remember. My pen leaks ink and I leak a few tears, as I begin to scribble down all those things absent from the day:

I miss iced tea.

(Photo: Mandie Sodoma)

I missed the taste of Union Station Chop't with Hannah.

(Photo Credit: Mandie Sodoma)

I miss the sweet smells of fall in Lincoln Park.

(Photo Credit: Mandie Sodoma)

Remember how you'd dash out of the apartment and always, always, always slam the door accidentally? Remember how you'd curl up in a little ball and cradle your phone in your hands and tell Julie and Lisa those stories of growing? Hilary, remember how you managed always to drink Starbucks, to practice sign language, or flash that beautiful smile of yours at someone with all the radiant confidence that it did make a difference to their day?

(Photo Credit: Mandie Sodoma)

DC is home, love. I write to myself as I prop my legs up on the chair next to me. It's okay to miss it. It's okay to wish it was still the vehicle for manna. 

And then the words flow fast like rain. Not puddle rain, joyful in your rain boots rain, not growing season rain. No, this is the harsh cold of water smacking the window pane. This is rain that blurs your vision, soaks through your jeans and leaves you shivering.

They don't tell you about missing home when you're home. They don't tell you that you'll suddenly want to claw your way onto a plane and search its seat pockets for your heart. There is no fine print for homesickness - you write your own side effects as you go, write into trembling shaky words that all you want is return. 

And oh, Father, Father, I miss this all so much, so much my stomach hurts and my throat catches and You make the missing hard today and I don't want here, I don't want this gift, this manna, this goodness. And I can't lie to You, because You are God and You are life and from You nothing is hidden. And I miss all of it, every day. 

---

And then I'm reminded, by that wise person who pulls me close when she hears that sigh of hard and she calls out: "There are good things in this day!"

I don't believe her all morning. I don't believe her at lunch.

But the manna finds me. It's our class on Catholic social thought and I get to present and my bones start to soak in teaching, summarizing the text and then asking the questions, and I feel a little light kindle.

And then the manna rains down, because I get coffee with my dad and he says, Yes, Hil, you can be a teacher. And then I sit in a lecture on Flannery O'Connor and I hear hidden bright and beautiful that writing is about the comedy of life. I am mesmerized, my mind filling with ideas about characters not yet written, ideas for stories and metaphors and that quick turn of phrase. I sit entranced by this lecturer's ease and his love for studying O'Connor and her Christianity, studying her characters as breathing, living, people. And I begin to eat, eat the good food that He puts in front of me. 


God sends us manna. Every day. Every day there is new provision, new mercies, new revelations. There are, as my wise friend Julie ponders in her blog, "many annunciations."

But so often, I don't want what I'm given. I don't want to eat this manna because I want it in its August package, with the shiny bow of Georgetown M St and the fresh clean air of Lincoln Park. I don't want to eat this manna in its messy package of the present, messy with my homesickness and my tiredness and my questions.

But I am learning how to eat. How to say thank you and take that first bite. How to pray over the day, how to swallow the good bread that is always given, always here, always what I need for the day. God always sends us manna, food from Heaven. He sends us that brilliant, breathtaking sky and that smile from someone on the sidewalk and He sends us each other and good thoughts and Flannery O'Connor and blogs from Lisa-Jo and Ann. He sends good bread.

And it is always good. 


Love,
Hilary

XOXO... Gossip Girl: American Sign Language and that Bad Habit We Never Discuss

So it's late on a Saturday night, a quiet one, a sitting-in-my-pajamas-and-eating-popcorn-with-honey Saturday night. And I'm watching "Gossip Girl" - the "scandalous look into the fabulous lives of Manhattan's elite..." And I suddenly remember this lingering blog post about gossip, about words, about their power and their meaning and I thought perhaps today might be a good day to dive back in and finish it. 


Yesterday morning, my sunshine yellow hat and I got ourselves on the 7:55 bus to DuPont Circle, the bus with my favorite bus driver (he calls out 'Union Station,' 'DC Courts,' and 'Metro Center' in the best possible voice), and I began my morning ASL lesson.

The lesson is mostly me sitting in my bus seat with my blue Signing Illustrated book propped open on my lap, my hands awkwardly trying to make the signs for "horse" or "establish" or "corn" or "reason." I love sign language more and more with every day. I carry my book in my bag and read it during lunch or on the Metro or even just in the lobby of fancy DC buildings (like the beautiful Heritage Foundation lobby that has these fake flowers that ALWAYS trick me into thinking they're real).

Yesterday on the bus, as we neared 13th and K Sts, I turned the page in the "Emotions and Abstract Ideas" I came across the sign for "gossip." I was taken aback. Why was the sign for gossip in my book, showing up that morning? I learned it. I took it in and tried to understand why it was being signed to me from the crisp white pages of Signing Illustrated. Why this morning, with its sweet November sunshine (the kind of sunshine that just seems to scream for tea with honey and an afternoon to sit in Lincoln Park and just breathe in the promises of fall)? Why am I thinking about how to create this word with my hands, make it tangible and felt in the world?

I tried to move on quickly, skimming over that word and into the more comfortable territory of "smart" and "feeling." But the sign repeated itself as I teetered through the marble lobby, showed up on my lunch hour while I sat with my coworker and thinking about the power of information about other people - the power that we seek in having information about other people. It even showed up on the bus ride home after a long day of glazed eyes and demography numbers in the Pacific Islands. I might have wanted to ignore it, might have wanted to pretend there wasn't anything to it and that, of course, like everything, it was just a passing thought through my whizzing brain and like so much else it would be gone tomorrow.

And beyond my interest at its staying power (why do some thoughts linger and others fade?) I feel more and more convinced that I am supposed to be paying attention to something in this sign for "gossip."

...And now it is January 31, the last day of the first month of a new year. It is January 31, weeks and weeks after the beginning of this blog post. I have journeyed through leaving a place I love and through that wonderful land of Italy, and have finally returned to here, to that nebulous place of the present, where I am asked to pay more attention, be more aware, live fuller and fully. And I want to bring this idea about gossiping, and our words, into this present.

Friends, our words are immensely powerful. Perhaps we forget they are powerful because we think we aren't powerful. We aren't dressed in the suits, carrying the briefcases full of legal jargon. We aren't in front of a microphone. We just whisper, whisper the "did you hear?" and the "I just found out that..." and the "Can you believe" so soft who can hear us, just to one small person, powerless like us.

We leak the secrets from our lips like faucets that won't stop dripping.

(http://levahnbros.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/dripping-faucet/)

Don't tell anyone else, okay? We say it quiet, that preface of powerlessness that keeps it safe, that drip, drip, drip of the precious things we've been told, the things we've seen and observed. And we make words about these things, cup our hands and in muffled laughter and low voices we are powerfully, awfully destructive. 

When we gossip, when we move our mouths without our hearts engaged, we make the worst kind of meaning, tell the stories that are anything but gratitude, anything but joy. We may be gleeful when we talk, but it's glee at your expense. 

Why do we do this to each other? I want to scream. Why do we choose that kind of power? But rather than dwell on this bad habit, on the hiss of words that hurt, I want to challenge and encourage us. 

What if, instead, we spoke the love words? What if we held out our hands, grabbed another person's, and whispered, "Did you hear - today, God is good?" What if we answered the seemingly benign question about another person with a simpler truth: "Between you and me,  today I thought of you, and I smiled and gave thanks." We have the power to shower the world with loving words, with a power and a life all their own. We don't have to choose the destructive words. We could lavish loving words, challenging, truth-filled words, joyful words on each other. 

Pour out the love words today. Pour out the joy words. Pour out the words that warm the spirit and comfort the weary eyes. Pour out the words that leave us breathless, fill your house with them, pour them over all those people that you haven't loved because it's hard. Pour out love words on them because they are true and they are kind and they are good. And though we will wobble, and fall, let's speak love today. 

Love to you, from the whole of my heart, 

Hilary

When Memory Smells like Vanilla Chai

It's been 6 weeks since I left Washington, DC and returned to snowy Massachusetts. It's been 6 weeks (almost 7 now) since I felt the cold steadiness of Eastern Market bricks under my feet. I haven't seen this vision (captured beautifully by my friend Hannah):

And the missing sometimes catches me at the smallest moments in my day. I'll be trekking through the muck of three day old snow on my way to granola and yogurt in the dining hall, thinking about all of the work I have to do by tomorrow (or sometimes by 3pm that afternoon), and I will remember. I will remember what it feels like to fill my lungs with city air. What it feels like to fall asleep with two girls and our messy closet tucked in tight on the top floor. How I couldn't make myself wake up before 7:25 for the 7:55 bus and ALWAYS ran out the door only to run down half of the stairs, realize I'd forgotten something important (like my phone or my wallet) and have to run back up and back down again and hope that the nice bus driver (the one who repeats, 'Union Station, Union Station' when the annoying female voice on the D6 bus says, 'Columbus Circle and First St') would be a couple of minutes late.

The memories pound fast and furious and my brain reels from their weight. I can't keep holding it all, but I don't want to put it down, leave anything in the lurch between Reagan Airport and Logan. A particularly wise woman suggested to me the other day that I can't, can't, can't carry everything from DC with me here. I don't have suitcases big enough for the tucked away treasures - that afternoon by myself walking home from the Utrecht art supply store, or the surprisingly good hummus and pita bread appetizer I got at Nando's Peri Peri restaurant in October. I can't wheelbarrow back the buckets of pictures or the innumerable sunny walks back by the gleaming Heritage Foundation, or I will become so exhausted that I'll collapse. Instead, this wise woman suggested that I take the time to sort through the suitcases I've brought back, choosing the treasures and truths to carry home with me. 


I've been listening to The Weepies a lot this week, as I try to put down into words and into roots the true treasures of my semester away, as I clear a path through the beauty and fill myself up with the joys and sorrows and presences that, for now, seem the most important to carry forward. And The Weepies have this song, called "Slow Pony Home," and it has these words in the beginning:

It's the second September I have known you
Four years or so ago, I rode a pony, called him "Truth"
We didn't know the way so it took us till today to get here

And all that time, I felt just fine
I held so many people in my suitcase heart
That I had to let the whole thing go
It was taken by the wind and snow
And I still didn't know that I was waiting
For a girl on a slow pony home...


I don't really know if the hope of Deb and Steve (the singers) is to speak comforting words to me as I sit at my desk in my room with so many people and places in my suitcase heart, but it is a slow pony home. It is a slow winding way back to regular, back to full, back to home. And as you've all been hearing about for a while now, I'm puzzling through this returning with aches of the other gravity, the other wind, the other air. I have a suitcase heart, and it's filled to the brim with so many things I'm not sure that I can keep holding onto it as tightly as I want to. Maybe Deb sings it right - I'm waiting for a girl on a slow pony home. That's me. Me on a slow pony home. 


And oh, what I would give to walk into this place: 

and curl up with One Thousand Gifts and read, read, read and talk, talk talk my way back into October. I would drink vanilla chai and walk through the all-too-short blinking intersection lights on my way to the Capitol.


And so, I smell the memory, color in and outside the lines of the blank pictures and paint bright yellows all over it. And so, I start looking outside me - because today? Today in Massachusetts is beautiful. Today in the snow that almost buries an entire tree outside my window there is so much beautiful, and I don't want to forget it, to think that beautiful things only happen in Washington, DC or in Rome, Italy or in Hammond, Indiana or in any place except the one that I currently call home. So I look outside and drink vanilla chai... 

Love,
Hilary


(photos - the first four from Hannah, and the last from me). 

Gift-Wrapping The Year: What I Wish I Could Give

I sit among piles of wrapping paper, a sea of greens and slivers of silver darting through like minnows. There are reds and crisp whites, tissue paper and too much ribbon, snowmen cards to say, "Hello," and "Merry Christmas from" and I am awash in the chaos of Christmas.

What I want to wrap up this year though, stow away for safekeeping under trees and in stockings are moments. This uncontainable laughing fit, that early morning on the rooftop deck overlooking the Capitol Building, the walk from 8th St to 2nd St. I sit among cardboard skeletons of boxes, my clothes still carrying their faint whiff of District air, and I want to wrap them up again and give them away. 

So I imagine.

I imagine wrapping up the gift of Ebenezer's Coffeehouse small vanilla chai and giving it to Hannah - watching as she unwraps with glee the hours that unfolded in our chairs by the glass door, our legs curled up under us and our hearts in our hands on the table. I can see the grin seep into the corners of her face as she realizes that I've included spontaneous trips to Georgetown on the Circulator and just a taste of the Pumpkin Spice Baked & Wired cupcake we shared over west coast espresso and Anthropologie dreams. 

I imagine tying a ribbon neatly on the gift of the D6 bus at 7:55am, hands in pockets as the group of us huddled together, waiting to begin our commute. I offer it to Virginia - the prompt 8:10 question about friendship or love, the laughing "see you in class!" when I clamber out the bus back doors at 16th and K St. I can see her sign "Thank you" and the faint echoes of laughter as she looks at me and envelops me in a hug, the two of us together remembering tea at 1:30am and signing our way through the Rayburn House Office building one brisk November afternoon.

I imagine carrying the big box of Family Night Dinners to Lisa-Jo and sitting with her at the long table in the back as she pulls out conversation after conversation. Mixed in I have placed Himalaya, La Loma, her favorite frosted sugar cookies. She smiles because we give each other Zoe, the gift of Life, and Grace, the gift of Love. And in the box of conversations I imagine Lisa-Jo finds created, chosen, cherished and celebrated on a small silver necklace - the conversation that means so very much to both of us who blog and laugh and live such very different and full lives. 

I imagine cupping my hands around a poorly wrapped cup of early morning coffee for Sam, our sweatshirts and hats keeping our ears warm as we laugh and talk, our heads together. I imagine she undoes the ribbon and discovers that I have included that first walk to the Lincoln Memorial and the stories we told each other. 

I imagine unwrapping a sunny afternoon at Jacob's with Cynthia, white chocolate mocha and green tea sipped in the rays of light on the brick patio. I imagine her joy at the small bundles of laughs I tucked in the corner of the box - our mutual love of bright pink shoes, yellow berets, and puppy dog faces. I imagine giving her smaller box, with nothing but a hug inside it.

I imagine presenting my apartment with the special, treasured gift of nights at our kitchen table, grinning like fools, laughing so hard they could hear us on the roof, our Sunday community meals, and our laughter ringing out over the living room where we sat at desks and uncomfortable couches, late night runs to 7-Eleven and the stories, the stories that would burst out of the wrapping paper into the air - stories of Harris Teeter groceries, Busboys & Poets, trips to Chop't and Starbucks and the world of Eastern Market. 

I imagine giving these gifts this Christmas, to all of those wonderful people who gathered around me this fall and surrounded me with more love than I could have imagined. I imagine giving these gifts, wrapping them up carefully in the semi-darkness of my bedroom, and joyfully presenting them under the tree. 

For now, I imagine these gifts, and I give them to you, readers, who are my special gift this season. Christmas is gratefulness - and this year, I am so grateful for you.

Love,

Hilary

When The Grocery Store Becomes Overwhelming (Pause, and Drink Coffee)

Today I inaugurated being in my hometown with the all-important trip to the grocery store. This trip is significant because this is not a local fresh organic produce market, or an overly expensive limited options grocery store on Pennsylvania Ave, or even the Peapod virtual grocery store where you search for what you want and your purchases are delivered to your door. Nope, this grocery store is your typical , so many options we don't know what to do with them, high in saturated fats and non-organic options, with so many aisles you could be filming a movie in one and the nice lady sniffing apples in the next one over wouldn't even notice. I was prepared for culture shock (or so I thought).

Our local Market Basket is only a few minutes' down the road, but it was a trip I have been dreading. I haven't operated a motor vehicle in just about 10 weeks, and the prospect of guiding our little green Honda down a stretch of 50 mph (where people actually go 67) and into the chaotic parking lot of overcrowded Christmas shoppers intimidated me.

However, this afternoon I ventured out of my driveway and down said treacherous stretch of road, and into said overcrowded parking lot. I locked my car. I walked into the automatic doors and into a blast of artificial heat. I exhaled.

My eyes had a heart attack. Everywhere I looked were blaring orange advertisements: Peppermint Candies! 2 for $0.99! Chicken Stock! Only $1.99! Campbell's Soup in a Can! Now Reduced Price! There were feathery paper decorations in green, red and gold over every checkout aisle. The fluorescent lights blared, the radio crooned Bing Crosby Christmas tunes, and I stood there, red basket in hand.

I wanted to scream FREEZE! This is going by me too fast! The noises of carts, boxes being stacked on shelves, people clamoring for attention, the steady bleep bleep of checkout lines, the music... I couldn't concentrate. I wandered through the store with an empty basket on my arm and a dazed look on my face. It was a simple task: get a carton of juice. But for the life of me I couldn't think of where and how to get the juice. Aisle 7 - where the non-refrigerated juice is stored, or Aisle 2, where the butter and cream cheese is kept? Did I want frozen make it yourself juice, or did I want juice boxes?

It is a strange thing to be so inundated with choices. The grocery stores seem to wear their number of choices like a badge of honor. If you have 35 types of cheddar cheese options, then you must be searching high and low to provide your customers with the best possible array. But what if your customer has just returned from a different place, and isn't equipped to choose from your brilliant array of cheddar cheese? What if she just wants you to hand her cheddar cheese, and guide her to the checkout, and leave the chaos for somewhere quiet? What if, when presented with choices, she can't make one?

This experience, I'm sure, is compounded when you return from a different country, where the very act of grocery shopping is not a scavenger hunt but actually a fairly brief errand. But there is something about the experience of return, and its temporary paralysis, that we all share. I can't make a decision in a grocery store, and I wander through my day marveling at the familiarity and strangeness of these sights, sounds and people. I sit in my living room, by the fire, with my cup of coffee and my computer, typing away, and I want to laugh and cry and smile and scream.

So I'm drinking coffee, and pausing in the midst of this day, to remind myself that the paralysis is temporary, that soon I will have returned more fully, and my lungs will fill with the air of this place, these people. In sign language, the sign for "here" involves moving your hands, palms facing the sky, in circles parallel to the ground (I know, a poor description... here is the sign). I find myself signing over and over, "I am here," in an effort to tell my body to rest, to exhale, to be. I don't know quite if I will ever cease to breathe a bit of DC air, feel the Potomac fever in my blood, yearn to see the people who entered my life in August and transformed it. I do hope, however, that my lungs will fill with Massachusetts air, and I will continue with great joy the relationships here. I hope that my grocery store will become more familiar.

Love,
Hilary

(P.S. Remember the pink shoes post?)

For Moments When You Must Do Something: Practice Sign Language And Sing

I am getting sick. There is a pesky almost-cough hovering the back of my throat. My eyelids feel tired and droop below their normal height. I woke up from six restless hours of sleep wondering why there was so much talk of leaving. It's tomorrow. It's tomorrow. I have arrived at the culminating moment of departure and friends, my body is waging war against the idea. It wants nothing but to curl up on this semi-comfortable couch and hide from anything remotely related to AirTran 807 Baltimore (BWI) - Logan (BOS).

So instead of packing my suitcase, instead of finding my lone sock or finally clearing things out from under the bed, I am sitting on said uncomfortable couch and practicing sign language. You see, I am clinging to the moments of the semester where I have felt most myself, most alive, most peaceful. Sign language, the physical embodiments of the words I love (and write) so often and so dearly, has become a place of peace for me as I contemplate leaving.

So YouTube plays me praise music and I practice. Hallelujah, grace like rain falls down on me... Beautiful One, I love... My God is mighty to save. I practice these phrases over and over with my hands, making signs for "beautiful" and "soul" and "savior" with a kind of hopeful desperation. I cling to sign language because I have become so much more of myself in learning to speak with my hands, in learning to love words when they are not spoken but created in the air. I practice, and I sign. I sit in the still of this living room that soon will no longer be mine... and there it is: a glimmer of peace, a glimmer of becoming ready to go home, a knowledge that God is good, and in my voice and in my hands, I can proclaim that goodness.

Today is a busy day - coffees scattered between more official meetings and final outings - and I can feel my need to "do something" taking over my desire to simply be in the space I am in for one last moment and one last day. A good friend told me in a letter that "a thing is mighty big if time and distance cannot shrink it." (Zora Neale Hurston first said so, but I can hear my friend saying it as well). Her words are true, and it is my hope that this semester, the people, the places, the work... are big enough to withstand the impending time and distance pulling me away.

So, in these moments, when we are paralyzed by a desire to fill our days running around and to do nothing, I am choosing to sign, and to sing. I choose to lift my voice in its quivering way, with Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson in "Winter Song." I choose to learn the signs to sing "Grace Like Rain" with my hands. I choose to pause, to seek peacefulness, to let my voice and hands and heart unite. I choose to trust that this semester is a mighty big thing, that my friendships here are mighty big things, and that the joy of God Himself is a mighty big thing, that neither time nor distance nor trial nor fear can shrink.

Love,
Hilary

For those we Love

Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to thy
never-failing care and love, for this life and the life to come,
knowing that thou art doing for them better things than we
can desire or pray for; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.