put on a little emmylou (a letter to preston)
Dear Preston,It's the one-month-mark today, here at the end of the winding road, the one that will so soon become that impossible stretch of green grass between us, aisle to union to marriage on the other side.Tonight, I'm playing songs on a playlist I made called, "h&p" - with everything that's indie and everything that's country and everything that's the way that these last days make me feel. I'm cleaning the almost emptied room, looking at the bags packed, the dresser drawers that creak with their once full life, their own sort of sweet goodbye.I'm playing the first dance song from J&E's wedding last weekend, the one that made me cry, the one where I was leaning against you, feeling your chest rise and fall with the steadiness that belongs to just you, that's more than oxygen entering and leaving, but the very tenderness of being next to each other.I wanted to write you a marriage letter early, the way Seth and Amber have written those, calling out on the waters of these blogs something, I don't even really know what, but something, some echo of the impossible hope that I feel building in my chest when I look over at you, after more than a year, awestruck and comforted all at once.But we aren't quite yet married, and for all its ache, there is something about being engaged that I felt like I had to remember, now at its closing days. So, Preston, here - a last-month-of-engagement letter.Put on a little Emmylou with me?We will move slow across the room, just a sway like that other time, and the time before that, when the work was too much and for a moment we shrank the world to the small steps across the ancient wood floors. We will move in the sticky rhythms of a second summer together, make our way around her voice laughter tickling our ears.Put on a little Emmylou with me, and I will press my hand into yours, we can drink lemonade along the water and you can steal more than one kiss before I duck my head, blushing, as the teenagers walk past in their colorful struts. I will wear your favorite dress and ask you a thousand questions about your favorite kind of pie and whether you think you'd ever live in the South of France.Put on a little Emmylou, Preston, and we will reread our story in the pages of graduate school applications and gall bladder surgery recovery, in wedding menus and Pinterest pages, in my grandmother's lost and now found ruby ring that I'll wear in a month and again, in the smallest whispers across a French 75 or a morning cup of coffee or a birthday present and a made bed. We will remember how we build this, and I'll make a joke that you laugh at and roll your eyes, and I'll make that face and you will laugh again.Put on a little Emmylou, darling, and I will start singing the way you like me to, unafraid, my feet up against the dashboard on the long drives, and I will promise you again and again, there is nothing quite as wondrous as stumbling on another way you've loved me - the boxes you've saved to open together or the the way you remember how much I love the Trader Joe's twizzlers or the way you relentlessly force my hand with Jesus, day after day, so sure that the only way to heal my heart is to ask me to open it again to God. Again, and again, I will sing it out, one year and two and ten and sixty-five, how it wasn't just happenstance, this love, but whole, and maybe even, holy.I'm singing with Green River Ordinance, now, again that line, put on a little emmylou, and we'll dance into the night, singing hold my loving arms, my loving arms are for you. And I remember how much love was singing at their wedding, in this song, in this dance, and so, my not just yet husband,put on a little emmylou,and slow, in the softness of these last days -hold me. My loving arms are yours.Love,hilary