Do you sing to your mirror?

I've started this kind of impromptu weekly question on Sundays. I asked you if you danced in your kitchen, and if you lost yourself in a good book, and now I have another question. 

Do you sing to your mirror?

When I was in DC in October, I wrote a blog post about why we sing into hairbrushes, why we remember that we are here to be joyful and laughing. And at that time, the post was about that horizon question of boys, and dating, and what it means to be single or not, what it means to be dateable. Now, the post reads differently, and the part I wanted to remember today wasn't the part about dating, but rather just this image:


And if you are like me, you immediately begin to sing to your keyboard, your monitor, your room at large. You forget that you share a small apartment with four other girls who probably don't want to hear your off-key rendition of "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain or your garbled "Everybody" by Ingrid. You forget that you are NOT, in fact, the leader of the next great hip hop dance team and you cannot one-two step like Ciara. You believe for 3 minutes and 51 seconds that everyone is listening to you sing in pure awe and wonder.


Today, friends, I came home from church and I did just this. Yes, in my room that has no mirror. In my church dress, my bare feet tapping their way across the old floorboards, the world for a whole three minutes about nothing but the joy of dancing around my room singing at the top of my lungs. 


My siblings and parents must wonder what that stomping noise is, and why they can hear country music blasting from behind my door, and what in the world I am thinking while I do this. 


I want to make the story of my life be one more colored with joy than with frustration. And so, this is the image for today. Singing with abandon. When I wrote the post in DC I was discovering that being myself included things like singing to every song I know the words to (and some I don't) and having dance parties and reading books for hours on end. Being Hilary means scrunching my face up in laughter and jumping up and down and trying to open my heart, even when it's hard, to the good things lurking in every day. 

(my beautiful friend, Hannah and I in California!)


And so, I wanted to ask you: do you sing to your mirror? Do you let the bass guide your foot in time with the music and let your voice, tenor or alto or mezzo or somewhere between fly free? Do you laugh halfway through and start the youtube video over, just so you can have 3 more minutes of uninterrupted fun? Psalm 134 says, "Praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, who minister by night in the house of the Lord. Lift up your hands in the sanctuary and praise the Lord. May the Lord bless you from Zion, he who is the maker of heaven and earth." And I believe that part of praise is the unabashed seriousness of singing to your mirror, and the delight of good music, and the wonder that comes from making it. 

Sing to your mirror, to your floorboards and your scattered shoes, sing and dance your way through three minutes of joy. Because the Lord is the maker of heaven and earth and His goodness is everywhere, and we can hear it if we laugh and listen closer. 


Today, I sang the following:


Country Girl (Shake it for Me) - Luke Bryan
You Lie - The Band Perry
For Good - Kristin Chenoweth & Idina Menzel
Celui - Colonel Reyel
Just a Kiss - Lady Antebellum
Mean - Taylor Swift
Mountain and the Sea - Ingrid Michaelson


And many more are still in the playlist waiting for their turn!


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

Welcome (A Five Minute Post)

Lisa-Jo sings out all the way from South Africa a prompt for us five minuters! Won't you join us, as we toss words in the air like balloons? This week it's about welcome. Here we go!

The grass crunches under my feet as I walk, hair tossing gently from side to side, boots muddied with the rain from this morning, or last night, and I hear it: welcome home. I've danced down this path in purple printed skirts and tights and I've slumped down this path at age 13 when I couldn't, and wouldn't understand that awful word funeral and the finality it breathed over the house, the garden, the pipe lying lonely on the sideboard, and now I walk down this path, up and out, into the promise I'm about to make.

I find the swingset, the one I played on when I was too small to remember anything but Mom's hand pressed firm against the small of my back and the feeling of being alive in the clean English air and the desperate desire even then to belong here, to be homesick for here, to own Greystones and keep chickens and yes, Mum, I'd whisper, can this be my house?

I sit there, praying love over the land, and I'm alone in the wonder of being 19 and planting my heart in England like a tiny seed that I keep praying grows a great miracle. Welcome home, I hear the land whisper back to me, and I look at the splashes of green and the trumpets of daffodils bobbing in the afternoon breeze and the gentle rustle of leaves tickling each other, and I find it: the promise of place.

Love,
Hilary