when this is fifteen months of gratitude

I hear him sing to Jackson over the hum of the suction machine. He gives me the gift of a long shower - take the time, Hil - and he scoops up our growing wonder of a son and they are off, dancing into the nursery, one or two quick passes with the suction catheter and back out to the living room, to the record player, to the lights on the Christmas tree and the windows that look out on the world he insists is more beautiful than I reckon it.I am thinking these days about my husband.I am thinking about how they tell you marriage is teamwork and then you learn it walking hallways mid-disagreement, mid-misunderstanding, and you knock on the door to your son's NICU area and you transform. You pause the conversation, pause the disagreement, and you walk the space of knowing your son. You walk the space of trach changes and whether or not to up his amount of milk per feed. You walk the space of who will hold him, who will suction him, who will prep and clean up after the small extra things we do to love on this growing wonder. You walk the work of language, how we will talk about Jack, how we will ask others to talk about him. You walk the silent wonder at how many more people understand than you ever thought would.I am thinking about how they tell you marriage is a great unfolding, a mystery, how you don't know who it is you married until you are already past the aisle, the vows, and into the world.--The first time I Skyped with my husband I fell in love with him. He was sitting in a bistro, headphone cord dangling, and drinking coffee. I was drinking iced tea from our grocery store terrified that I wouldn't seem casual enough. I was wearing running shorts and an old T-shirt; he'll think I'm very athletic, that'll be good. I talked too fast and not fast enough. One hour became five, the bistro closed, he called me on his cell phone from his driveway.I couldn't have told you then we'd have a son named Jackson who would bring us to the NICU in Temple for forty days. I couldn't have told you then that we would learn how to care for a tracheostomy, that we would number hours and weeks like stars. I couldn't have told you, staring at my computer screen one hot July night, that I would sit in the kitchen the first Sunday of Advent crying because I've never known someone to love so unapologetically.You don't know who you married until you do. And even when you do know, looking at a senior boy from Baylor in your computer screen late on a July night, you learn it for the first time every time.--This is a post about gratitude.He remembers what day the trash collection is. He remembers what is in the fridge and in what order the leftovers can be eaten and recreated. He knows how to make Jack smile as they dance to the record player, to the Christmas tree, to the windows. He knows that this world is more beautiful than I reckon it most days. He knows to tell me that.--It is the first Sunday of Advent. I'm sitting in the kitchen while it rains outside and Jack sleeps nearby.You don't know who you married until you do. And you learn them again and again. And they will take your breath away.Love,hilary

when this is the seventh month of gratitude

I promised a long while ago that I would keep up this accounting of gratitude for marriage, for the spin of our ordinary days, for the way you learn to move, two by two, day by day, in the quiet and the loud and the in between. I promised myself, maybe in some way I promised this blog, this space I keep carving in, bit by bit, marking where I am and where God is.We've been married almost eight months.When I say that it sounds long and short. It sounds like newlyweds and it feels like we've been married forever, we've always been here, always been rounding another bend of time. I forget to be faithful with the laundry. I get mad at myself which makes me avoid it even more, til there are two laundry baskets and a hamper full of things quietly asking for my attention, for my simple act of caring for the space we share and the work we take on, two by two. And it's so gentle, this forgetfulness, that it makes me so angry I'll pick a fight over something completely unrelated because I have this idea of what kind of person I should be in a marriage, what kind of house I should keep, what kinds of things I should do and say and feel and think...I get mad about the laundry. That's the truth in this seventh month, and the gratitude is as simple as that: he waits for me.He waits for me through the rage portion, the avoiding eye contact and getting eerily quiet portion. He waits for me to lose my temper and then go silently inside myself to find it again. He waits even when his hands are full of dishes. When we have only 10 minutes to get somewhere and we are already behind. He waits.And in waiting, he keeps his heart open to me. He waits for me to find the words, to find the thread, to walk my way back from the edge of cliff or from the confusion or the silence.Marriage is the fullest kind of mirror. It shows the ways that you're loved right in the midst of showing you all the things you really do and say and think. It reveals and it redeems. Marriage calls you out of your secret, silent heart and into that hallowed space where your belonging sings in your bones. In this, the seventh month, where I know I've gotten mad about laundry or sad about not going on a walk every day or worried about absolutely everything for no good reason... in this seventh month I can list for you all of those things, but what I know most deeply is just this:The love of my life will stay at the sink with the dishes undone or sit in the car when we're already late or hold me in our living room with all that unfolded laundry, and all the while, he is teaching me that love is patient.I'm grateful for this: that the love of my life waits for me, especially now that we're always around each other, always nearby, always close. He still waits. And that waiting is a great gift.Love,hilary

when I find dirt on my wedding shoes

I had a plan for my wedding shoes, even before Preston proposed to me. I'd seen them in a magazine the previous Christmas and in so many wedding Pinterest pictures. They were the perfect color pink - ballet pink, the kind that's gentle but strong and not too flashy but not too pale - made of what look like satin ribbons, flat but elegant. I've wanted to be graceful like a ballerina for a long time (far longer than I actually studied ballet, I should admit), and these were the shoes I imagined wearing.They fit perfectly, and I kept them in their box without ever touching them or wearing them. I would show them off in hushed whispers, the tissue paper crinkling, slip them on for no more than ten minutes and always inside. I couldn't imagine ever wearing them anywhere - they were the thing I thought would make me beautiful.--And today I was cleaning our closet on a whim listening to the rain outside and I tried on my wedding shoes again, just to see. I don't know if any of us are very far from thinking beautiful things are magic, and so I stood amid the dust and the old scarves and the sweaters and I slipped them on.They fit perfectly.They're covered in dirt.I began a lament, half-formed the words on my tongue and half whispered them to the mirror, looking up and down and wondering where all this dirt had come from, if I should put them somewhere safer than in the midst of all my other ordinary shoes, as if they should be kept safe from my ordinary life, from my growing self.--But I couldn't stop looking, noticing, and then I realized: the dirt makes them beautiful.The dirt is the witness to the growing of a young marriage, the beginning, the glorious running through the world and the slowing down, the catching each other, the catching ourselves, the being constantly caught up in God. They're bearing the marks of marriage: the almost five months, the honeymoon where we got tattoos and the wandering through the grounds of my high school where we got married, the scuffs of grass from down by the river where we walked in the haze of a Texas summer. I can squint and see the mystery green pen marks I tried to erase with a Tide pen now permanently etched at their edges. They're wearing history now, a bit of rainwater, worn from being stamped in frustration or impatience. And they wear the history of love, how different and the same it is, how easy it is to forget that love is always moving in wild uncontrollable circles, bringing more people in, bringing you closer to the one you love, sealing the ark and the ache of marriage with every click of the lock and every first peek of sun too early in the morning.--We tell ourselves to make memories because time goes too fast, to take pictures, to Skype every detail back home lest we lose sight of who we are or were or could become.But perhaps our lives are already bearing witness to it. Perhaps it is we who are too worried to notice that the rest of our ordinary is holding and bearing to us the story of us, of our marriage and jobs and moves and fights and triumphs. Perhaps our shoes, even those we were so afraid to touch, are beautiful when we let them wear and retell our stories.Perhaps the dirt on my wedding shoes is a better storyteller of this hallowed beginning than I can hope to be.And perhaps, I should stand still in the perfect pink shoes now flecked grey and brown and that funny hint of green in my closet on a Saturday and listen.The story they tell is so beautiful.Love,hilary

when this is two months of gratitude

There are long days. The days where you wake up full of your own self, your own thoughts, your own worries - and there is the other person, the one whom you love, awaiting you.And you brush your teeth and think about what clothes to wear and what work needs to be done that day, and you think you'll fall behind if you don't spend every ounce of yourself in your new work, in school, in all the big bold things God brought you here to do.And you'll eat your yogurt and say something you don't even think twice about, which is the problem, of course, that you didn't even think about it, and then you are caught, not just by this person whom you love - no, you are caught too by that description of Jesus from Philippians 2 -

"In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:Who, though he was in the form of God,did not regard equality with Godas something to be exploited;but emptied himselftaking the form of a slave,being born in human likeness.And being found in human form,he humbled himselfand became obedient to the point of death -even death on a cross."

And it goes on, this kenotic hymn of such clarifying, terrifying beauty, you know that moment you hear something you keep wishing you wouldn't hear?  Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed - not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence - continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." (Philippians 2.4-8 above, then 12-13)Most of the time, my husband goes first in the self-emptying.I am grateful that marriage is a self-emptying work. One that I fail at, more often than I can accurately describe. Because the work isn't a trick of convention or a sudden blaze of glory. It is smallness made holy, an unbecoming of so much of what we grow accustomed to being - caught in our own worlds, however beautiful they are, however good, however purposeful. We grow used to our largeness, the hero-of-our-own-life-ness, the safety of being wrapped up in ourselves.And then we are charged to work out our salvation, to self-empty, to loosen our grasp of the secure circular thoughts and to love one another. To love another.My husband so often goes first. So often, he asks the first question, calls out for me, insists on knowing what's behind the sigh or the half smile or the look-away or the hopeful side glance. And in the long days, when even your two-months-of-gratitude post is late, that calling out is an aching kind of love.I don't know if gratitude can truly capture it, how it makes me see him, see myself, how often I forget that we live and move in tandem with each other, how it is such work, such hard, gratifying, knees in the dirt work, to love each other.He reminds me to cherish the work that is love.The longest days, when it takes self-emptying, you sense that you are at the very beginning of the work. You eat your yogurt and you hear God tell you again -This work of love is the coming alive of you.To have this mindset, as was in Christ Jesus,to empty, to become small again, to rememberthe terrifying and beautiful fear and trembling,and God, who works in us.Love,hilary 

I'm leaning harder

"You've changed." He tells me this as we're getting ready to turn in for the night among the whir of electric toothbrushes and the ripples of the brush through my hair. I turn, still trying to loose stray knots from the red lion's mane around my neck. "Changed?"I know you're thinking that this is an obvious one: marriage changes you. He nods. "Yeah. You're more sure of yourself. You're leaning harder into Jesus, too."We keep talking, our voices circling in the dark, how things are new and different, how my thinking has sharpened on some things, how we've both learned to weigh and sift our words anew, because we live with someone who wears our words like birth marks on their skin. We slowly drift into the silence, the comforting dark of another day that has been put to rest.But I can't fall asleep. I'm still thinking about that, the leaning harder, the change.It's not that marriage changes you that surprises me: it's the weight of the change. It's the way you carry the change in your ribcage and guard it like your bones guard your heart. How you feel it differently, more than just self-awareness or increased confidence or courage, feel it some more physical than that, feel it in those tugging counts of the hairbrush and in the whirring electric toothbrush.I've said for years I don't do change well. That I'm a creature of habits of my own making, that if I want to be spontaneous I want to the only one in control of that spontaneity, the one who decides to change the plan. I've declared foolishly that I'm just not very good at it and thought it would be a sufficient excuse to never have to do it. I thought God would give me a pass on transformation bigger than the ones I say I'm ready for.But the Spirit moves us along in the wiser pace - the pace we wouldn't set for ourselves. So here I am, being changed in big ways, ways that make even the word marriage bigger because it has now begun to mean all that changing, all that becoming between me and my husband and our voices circling in the dark.I'm weak-kneed from the changing. Maybe that's why I lean so much harder. Maybe we lean into Jesus not out of the virtue of feeling like we have the time, or we simply desire it - maybe we lean in desperation. Because the joy of the Lord is our strength, and his joy in my changing in the ways that are perhaps much more than I wanted is the strength in me to do the changing, to submit to the changing.So I lean harder on Jesus because Jesus calls the change forth from me in this marriage, in the little ark of family that my husband and I make every day, and because Jesus is the way to change.But what about that other part? Me being more sure of myself?I'm still awake, my eyes searching the ceiling, my hands over the blanket, tracing a pattern in the quilt. Most of the changes these past weeks make me weak-kneed, remember? So how can that make me sure of myself?In an Orthodox church near my hometown there is an icon of Mary, called in Greek the platytera, which means "wider" or "more spacious."  The icon is of Mary, her womb a golden circle with Christ inside, holding up a hand in blessing. Mary's hands are outstretched, a position of prayer.I think about that icon often, for it puts an image to the meaning of Christian - to be a bearer of Christ. To bear Christ in this world, even as Mary did. Somehow this is not separated from her hands in prayer, the way that she is presenting Christ to the congregation in the icon, even as she presented him while he was on earth and even now as we in turn are sent out each week to put on Christ, to see Christ in one another.Maybe being sure of myself is in this: I am learning what it means to put on Christ, and therein lies my real self, my self that is raised to new life in the power of Jesus. Maybe being sure of myself is not a confidence but a clinging, my own hands and weak knees opened in prayer, my own feeble heart even now becoming more of a home for the living God."I've changed."I whisper the words in the dark as I begin to fall asleep. Perhaps it is its own prayer.Keep me leaning on you, Jesus, where I can be sure of myself.Love,hilary

the first month of gratitude

When this is a month of gratitude.That sounded like a good way to title this post, but truthfully I don't know what to call it.--It's been a month and a day since I married Preston.And in a month I didn't know you could learn so much thankfulness that it seems foolish to try and contain it in words in an online space, seems almost laughable, but then words are cherished vessels, and sometimes, they're what we have, and the writing is a most needed remembering.--I didn't know you would be grateful for the noise of the coffee grinder because it means he lets you stay in bed longer. Or the way that taking out the trash when he's running another errand would mean so much. I didn't know you could learn to revel in doing small things like unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry while watching a show together, how that could be the most romantic afternoon. I didn't know about the joy of takeout or the joy of leftovers that become something new and beautiful tasting under his watchful eye. I didn't know about the Splendid Table podcast or how to share in things that you are new to loving with the one that you love. I didn't know your heart could be taught again and again the meaning of the word, "thank you" when it's dinner or dish washing or keeping track of the ways to use up the vegetables from the farmer's market. How saying thank you would be a thing that he would teach me, day by day, gesture by gesture.--I didn't know that sometimes I would need the discipline of writing down the gratitudes, the way that you must ask of yourself the work of remembering, of thankfulness, because even the deepest love becomes accustomed to itself sometimes and even the thing that was and is and will keep being so wondrous, like making a home with your best friend, asks to be remembered among the work of building it.He has told me more than one about the importance of telling stories, so that things will not be forgotten. He told me again on a drive into the city, my feet in their customary position tucked up under me and my eyes half-closed against the sun. I didn't say anything in the moment, and I should have. He has a wise heart. I should have said that, should have said then and there that he is teaching me the work of remembering and telling the stories, the love stories, the ordinary grace stories, the extraordinary provision stories, the stories that we will write on doorposts in our house that the generation to come might yet praise the Lord.I should have told him the story again of the drive home from the airport the first time, when everything was so new and I didn't know how to lace my fingers through his, when we knew and didn't know how we knew, on that walk leaning late into the hazy rain of June.--It is a month of gratitude, the thousand thanks Ann teaches, spilling out over our days. We must do the work of remembering the blessings, tell again and again the story of manna coming down from heaven and the way that we are provided for, the way that we are loved. We must tell the stories of love at first meeting and the way we build love, gesture  by gesture.This is my first month of gratitude.Love,hilary

dear hilary: building the gates

Dear Hilary,

You seem to be pretty guarded online, while your husband isn’t. This has me asking questions of what I, newly married myself, think about putting my life on the Internet. How do you or you and your husband think about those boundaries? So much of your own relationship, from what I have witnessed, is thanks to the Internet. So, yay Internet! But what about the danger zones or the places where you have to set boundaries?

Sincerely, Newly married and lost in the borderlands

Dear Newlywed,

I was nine years old. I was walking through fields in the south of England, by myself for the first time, on the lanes immediately surrounding my grandparents' house. In England, when you come to a break in the path and it continues onto someone's pasture, there is a high gate that you usually have to climb up a few steps, unhook the gate from the other side, climb over and then rehook the gate after you.

I thought I could scale the fence.

In my purple (probably stolen) sweater and boots that were a little too big for me and these polka dot leggings and let me tell you there were also ruffles on my socks. It was a complete outfit - there I was, trying to clamber up over the fence without any pretense.

It didn't go that well. I got caught on part of the fence and I came dangerously close to ripping said sweater and came very near to losing my balance into a ripe pile of mud and cow pie. I finally gave in and pushed up the heavy iron ring that keeps one post of the fence closed against the other, and proceeded down the other side and on my way to the playground.

What is it about fences?

We try so hard to scale them, Newlywed. We try to be the confidant, the one who is in the know, the person with the most in-depth analysis and interpretation and information. And in a world where so much information is available, is possible to find and have and be the possessor of, I think we take to scaling fences.

It's not all bad. It's not all out of malice or wrong intent. Often I think we find something we love and so, in our eagerness, seek to know everything we can about it. And we usually don't stop long enough to think about whether or not it's something we ought to know.

And in the world of the internet, where a Google search can find you someone's high school photos, it's so easy to start wandering through the middle of the field without thinking too much about where we are walking.

And so my husband and I have worked on our fences. We sat down on car rides or lazy afternoons on the porch while the fall wind ruffled the trees and hammered out where the gates would be. Our blogs - what kind of path of our life did they open to the general public? What kind of personal details do we include in our storytelling along the way? What about Facebook, or Instagram or Twitter?

And we built them slow, and we build them still in the midst of learning about each other, because marriages are living things and so when we meet something new, we ask ourselves: what should go through the gate? What shouldn't? What can shed light and laughter along someone's walk in the woods and what is just ours?

We met because we are writers, because we love the way words sound and feel on a page, because of the ache and promise of them. But for every word that's in the public binary code turned HTML turned text you read on your iPhone screen, there is more to it. There are the thousand things unspoken between us, there are the things spoken only in the whispers across the couch or the front seats of the car, there are the things we remember with and for each other that we keep to ourselves.

The beautiful thing about building fences and gates is that the gate is the gesture of welcome, the fence the gesture of protection, and those two things - welcome, and protection - live together in harmony. Building one doesn't mean that you need to abandon the other.

We need each other's stories along this long and winding road. And we need each other's fences to protect for each other the things that should belong only to a few.

So, Newlywedded, I don't think you're lost in the borderlands: I think you're right where you are, in your plot of land, and you've got some timber and some time with your spouse. Start to build.

We'll love the paths you make for us to walk around in.

Love,hilary

when this is making a home

I was fourteen. The age where all your limbs are back to their newborn feeling, you've changed jeans sizes twice or three times, up and down as your body asserts sheer aliveness. I tripped over things all the time, and more than one well-placed odd brick in the familiar sidewalks in Newburyport were my undoing all summer.Dread finds you like a slow drop of water dragging its way down your back. It slides over you, leaves a sticky trail behind in its wake. The international terminal at Logan airport, November, my newly teal and purple colored braces, an endless drip of details. My dad's suitcase, borrowed for the occasion, in the back, and my backpack, forcibly begged a few nights before - white and blue, Jansport like the other girls, but mine was too new, too shiny. It didn't look like I skied across open fields on the weekends with it. I tried to scuff it with my hands as I sat in the front seat, my mother chatting in the back of the van, my dad's eyes keen on the road ahead of us."You're going to have so much fun," my mother told me, her voice almost singing. I nodded dumbly. "It's not every day you get to go to France for a whole month!" I only half-hearted smiled, whispered, "Mais, oui," before I stopped, almost in tears.Departure is like dread. The airport was immediately close but traffic kept it ever-approaching, past the dog racing track exit and the two dangerous rotaries and the sixteen Dunkin' Donuts, on both sides of the highway. We parked, we made our way to AirFrance check in. We saw my classmates. My mother, who is relentlessly kind and friendly, chatted with the teachers. My dad drank a small coffee quietly, patted me on the shoulder, smiled.It was the first time I'd left home.--I used to think being a homebody means being someone afraid of change, someone who doesn't adventure, the lack of curiosity. I am both, but they don't mean each other. A homebody, I have learned, is more often the person who burrows deep into places, who scatters pieces of himself into the walls and floors and doorways and sidewalks, builds belonging with place. They're the people who trace the same path on their morning run, not only out of habit, but out of love. They love home, but home is also the thing they know best how to make, everywhere.--I was a new twenty, in the city almost two months when my father came to visit. I met him at the Newseum cafeteria, coming all the way over from my internship site on the Metro, moving with the sure footing of my SmarTrip card and my work wardrobe. I took him to dinner at my favorite restaurant, loud as it was with the happy hour crowds drinking blueberry martinis while we had water and burgers and fries, and I told him the stories: Eastern Market, walking to the Metro, learning to cook a little on my own, the way that I never thought I would, the Baptist church I went to, the almost-tattoo in Adams Morgan."You've made a home here, Hil," my father told me as we walked back towards Union Station under a still-warm sky, "It's so good to see."--Home is not about travel or return. Home is about widening spaces in the heart.No one famous said that, I don't think, but it sounded wise.--The day of my wedding, I saw my dad first when I was trying to move a box of bouquets into the room where I was getting ready with my bridesmaids. I saw my mom a little later, when I was trying to give my car keys to someone. She was wearing one of my favorite dresses she owns, a cornflower blue, and I remember she laughed. There was a remarkable kind of laughter that day, rich, full, the kind that bubbles over and makes you think you must gather it, the woman at the well first hearing of living water.The kind of laughter you grow accustomed to over the years, the kind that fills you and fills you and gifts you the grace and courage to leave, to begin.And this is how I have learned to begin to make a home, ten years after that first departure:to fill the rooms with laughter.Love,hilary

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

for when love is desperate

I woke up in the haze of the night, that space where the sunrise is slowly bleeding into the day, where rain casts an enormous shadow, where there are things like jury duty and immediate deadlines and the last plane ride of the man back to Texas.Sitting in the eerie, half empty room with the other wanderers with their bleary-eyed coffee, their newspapers and knitting, their snuck-in granola bars eaten quietly, it struck me that this journey is almost over - well, perhaps, almost begun. Or both.I can't tell you why, but when they dismissed us - justice reached between the hallways and the bank of elevators - and I was driving back in to work, to meet that deadline, it hit me: this is the man I'm marrying.This is him.I started to laugh, but at the same time I started to cry. I was laughing and crying along a 10 mile stretch of road that I have never seen before, with small clumps of pansies blooming in the median boxes, the rain still hesitantly pounding the windshield, and two UPS trucks turning left and right and me in between them. I was laughing at myself, at this beautiful world, at the fact that in that moment I realized it:I'm marrying the person I always and never imagined.I had to tell myself that I was still driving, that this is the middle of the workday, that the world is racing past me and there are places to go and deadlines to meet, because in a moment, I am a heap of tears and shaky breathing and laughter, so much laughter it seemed to rebound off the walls and windows, carrying me.I think this must be what it is like to fall desperately in love.Not a hurricane, no, but the steady second, third, hundredth time falling into love. This is the we've been engaged for a long while now, the we know who does the dishes and sets the table, the ordinary missed words and not missed eye-rolls, who loves hummus and who loves sea urchin, where she always forgets her glasses and where he always puts down the car keys. This is the falling in love again with all the familiar, with all the still-surprising, with the way that love turns out to be eating leftovers on the floor or walking to the pond when the sun finally comes out and warms the earth.I always imagined that it would be as simple as that, the person as inevitable as breathing. I never imagined it would be so good, goodness essential as breathing.This isn't the post where I can say anything profound about love, other than I didn't realize how much you keep falling into it. How you fall into it, again and again, when you realize that this person still thinks you're the best thing that has ever happened when you oversleep and mess up plans and forget things. How the fact that he knows how much I love hummus and steak makes me cry. Or how he never lets a day go by where he says, "Hello, beautiful," and there I am, hopelessly falling into love.This is the post where I say that I spent that drive laughing and crying because I'm getting married to Preston. Because it's the hundredth time I've fallen in love with him, and love it wild, and sometimes I could cry with how extraordinary it is. And laugh.Love,hilary

when you say yes

Maybe you've heard a time or two from this blog post or that Facebook status update or a tweet or two, that I'm getting married and moving to Texas. Maybe you've heard something about graduate school, about me and philosophy and these three little letters that will (Lord willing) go after my name in about five years, letters that symbolize the working and wondering and the mind-boggling amounts of reading I'm going to try and do in those years.But here is the thing, the thing I never knew I would be writing: before I said yes to Baylor, before I said yes to learning how to properly say, "Sic 'Em, Bears" (it's more complicated than you think) - I said a different yes.I said yes in a library of love letters.I said yes in the haze of an August afternoon, in the haze of falling into love, realizing ourselves already in it, maybe some of you who read all those letters were wondering about it, yourselves.I said yes to this, the ache and ark of marriage (that's Denise Levertov, in a poem called, "The Ache of Marriage").It was the best yes: that day, moment after moment of driving along a highway and to the grocery store, of kissing him in the parking lot, thinking, you're it, you're my fiancé now, you're the person while we looked around helplessly, chose strawberries, I think, feeling our way through the rest of the day the way that the blind trace the edges and shapes of the world and so see it better.Saying yes to Preston, now almost seven months ago - that was my best yes.It was the best yes, and no, I don't mean that in the way of comparing one person's choosing, moment, realization of God's calling loud and bright in their life versus another. Because God calls as God calls, and for me, in this season, the lesson is that the calling is presented only to you. Others may confirm it, see it, strengthen it, slow it down -but God is calling you. You are the hearer, you are the listener. You are the called.We are so quick to worry and to wonder if God is speaking, but I keep thinking these days, He must be speaking all the time but I have no ears, or no time, or no patience enough to sit still and hear. I run up to God's door this Lent, over and over, begging for a word and God looks at me:Hilary Joan, have I not been singing over your life? Have I not been calling you, August haze to March frost?Am I so quick to forget how loudly God is singing, whether or not there are big moments of yes or no, big choices, big afternoons with big promises?God is still singing after I say yes to Baylor, God is still singing after I said yes to Preston, after the big moments and the big decisions and the feeling of momentum and moving forward with things.God has always been singing out over us, over these waters we walk on, calling out to us to come a little closer.Love,hilary

when this is a thought about marriage

Preston starts his posts with that word, "when" - an invitation, I think, to realize the passing of time and the not-passing-of-time, the way when you sit to read his words you remember that you are exactly where you are, reading, in your kitchen or on your iPad. It's funny how the vocabulary of the one you love begins to seep into your own, their words swirled next to yours, the way tea steeps in a mug on an early morning.I've been thinking about marriage - maybe that's not so surprising - and when I think about it, inevitably, I start thinking about the ways we talk about marriage. I think about the advice blogs, the story-becoming-advice blogs, the blogs that remind us that this a great big work, different from anything we've tried before, blogs that remind us that this is also the most normal unfolding of life, the most apparently inevitable thing, the way that they hold your hand or kiss you good morning is the only thing that could be.And my head fills with other people's thoughts faster than its own sometimes, trying to think my way into wisdom about marriage, sewing a patchwork quilt of what other people have done and thought and tweeted and posted and shared. But my stitches fumble, and when I look over at him in the quiet of the morning, the pieces slip to the floor. I can't read my way into being good at marriage. I can't repost or borrow or sew together thoughts to cover us in the moments when we don't understand each other, or those moments, even more surprising, when we understand better than anyone else ever has.And maybe, before journeying down the road of what someone here and there says will make this work, I must close my eyes, lean into what is right in front of me. The way he says hi on Skype, ties his tie when we are going out to dinner, the way we laugh or curl up to watch Game of Thrones together or the way that we  both know when it's a night to stay in, instead of go out, a night to pray, a drive where we will talk about deep things in the church or a drive where we will ask about our favorite praise songs growing up.Once, before Preston and I got together, before the full unfolding that would be this love story, I went for a walk with a friend. It was warm, the end of May in New England, when the world bursts green and the sun plays with the trees, throwing its light on everyone who passes by. We walked, talking about marriage, talking about love, and I remember so desperately wanting to store up everything she said, learn and memorize her words until they sang out from me as if they were mine. But as she talked, and we wandered out of the woods, back into a small cluster of houses around a pond, the afternoon stretched long and we leaned into it.She didn't want me to memorize her stories. She was telling me as a way to push me towards discovering my own. She was sharing about her life, her marriage, not as blueprint but as beautiful, as the wonder of how God led her and her husband into and out of each thing. She was telling me, not because she knew best, but because she knew how much of the story we must write on our own.I don't know if I believed her at the time. But I do believe her, now, in the months that still stretch out before our wedding, in the nights in and out, the jeans and sweatshirts and the salsa dancing club and all the wonder of the in-between every day learning each other.It isn't a blueprint. It's just all, always, beautiful.Love,hilary

one year ago (to my sister)

Dear sister,A year ago, right now, we were standing in the hot summer Colorado sun, standing and posing and laughing and trying to jump in the air while not landing badly on three inch silver heels (and yes, I managed to still trip in them, but at least it wasn't while walking down the aisle). We were in the midst of this good day that God had made, our hair neatly curled and our makeup spotless, and when you walked outside in that dress I knew no one had ever looked that beautiful before.You have always been the one to go first, the one with braces first and a car first, the one who got to be in a marching band and the one who went to school dances and proms. I remember sneaking into your room when you weren't around during your senior year of high school and trying on the dress from your junior prom. Do you remember it - you'd gotten it from Filene's, I think, and I had seen you come out of the dressing room and I had thought, no one was as beautiful. I never had a prom; but I remember sitting in the cramped auditorium seats that year to watch you walk across the stage - the Grand March, they called it - my face eager for just a glimpse of you.And I remember the time that Mom and Dad traveled away, and the boys went with them - to England, I think - and it was just you and me at home. You picked me up from school and we ate dinner together at the kitchen table and then went to Starbucks (something we wish we could do more than we do now), and I told you about the boy I liked, and you smiled at me and told me to wait and see, that God would bring the best thing at the right time. You told me that boys are complicated. You told me that hearts hurt but that they also heal. I still think about that now.And then I remember, smiling and laughing as I write this, that phone call when he proposed, and it was midnight our time but I waited up for you. We crowded in the hallway just by the linen closet between my room and our parents', and we could all hear how your joy spilled over the phone line and time change, how surprised you were, how good it was. I carry that memory with me, too, and I can remember the feel of the floorboards creaking as I paced back and forth, listening to the story, overwhelmed and overjoyed.And then last year, when I walked down the aisle before you, when I turned, finally at my place, and saw you and Dad walking together, I thought then, too, that no one was as beautiful as you were. And then you married the man whose heart is wide and honest and faithful. You married the man who makes you laugh and smile quiet, the man who builds a home with you and prays with you and loves you.One year ago, we were in the middle of your wedding day, silver shoes and a blue dress, and I carry those memories with me as I sit in a Starbucks in Texas, while the afternoon rolls on and the sky outside is the same blue as that Colorado sky.You teach me the way of love is a long journey, a daily obeying, a moment by moment cherishing. You teach me that there is more to it than high school boys and the Friday nights without someone to take us to the movies. You teach me that it is built in the ordinary, in the every day, in all the small things that turn beautiful in their time.You were the most beautiful bride I have ever seen, one year ago -but you are more beautiful now,and every year forward, because you keep teaching us to love. Because you keep loving.Love,your sister

to the newlyweds

While Preston and I are on sabbatical for the summer in our letter writing, I thought I would keep up with letters. These, though, are letters with a bit more of my imagined, someday life, and a little bit less of the every day. I wanted to store them up, these daydreams, because even though we should live in the present, there is something to every once in a while glancing out and imagining the horizon.Dear newlyweds,I saw your pictures on Facebook the other day, pictures of rings against flowers and book pages, pictures of you staring in amazement at each other, pictures of pinwheels and cakes and dances between you and the hundreds of people who gathered around you to love you.I saw your pictures and I thought about you. About the work that this is. About the wonder that this is. About how you might be wondering and fearing and rejoicing all at once. I don't know very much about the world, not now, probably not for many years. I don't know a thing about marriage except that it is beautiful and difficult and rich with blessings.Sometimes the blessings feel heavy. Sometimes we don't know how to be ourselves. We don't know how to be ourselves AND be one with another person. We don't know if we can surrender that much, trust that much, stay faithful when we desperately wish to run away. We don't know what the big step was, exactly, only that together there is more than when we are alone, and together you are something new. Between the showers and the barbeques, between standing in line at the DMV to change your name, between hoping you don't trip down the aisle or lose the rings or forget the dance steps you both practiced diligently... I wanted to say that what we see, from our pews and from walking down the aisle in borrowed shoes and stiff hair?We see miraculous love.We see promises made right on the edge, the edge of who we are and who we are called to become.We don't worry about whether your napkins are the right shade of coral or if you missed the double spin. We don't second guess your choice of cake or how you made the seating chart. We are too caught up in rejoicing that you love this boldly. That you live with a wild love for each other. I wanted to tell you this because maybe after it all settled down, you still feel the strange surreal heaviness of this new life you're making together. Maybe after you came home to your apartment or your house, to your boxes and leftover spaghetti, you wondered what we all witnessed, what it is that happened.We saw the joy, raw, palpable, spilling out of you. My friends and I sometimes joke that there is a flood on facebook of weddings, of matching dresses and clinking glasses. Sometimes we are jealous of you, jealous of what we worry we won't find, hopeful and fearful all at once. But the secret is that even in that we recognize the heart of what you have done. We love it. We feel the raw joy spilling out over the megapixels and crackling phone lines and from pew to pew.I am touched and changed because I get to see how you love.I learn about love because I get to celebrate with you.Your new marriage, the baby bird of it, helps us remember the feeling of leaping into the unknown and being caught in the wonder of it.So I pause in my day, in between emails and grant proposals and puzzling out the new work before me to whisper to you: remember that your baby bird marriage is a beacon of love. You shine bright.Be unafraid of the big work ahead. There is more grace than you can imagine in store for you. Be unafraid of where you go, what you eat, how you burn brownies and fight over jobs or church or money. Be unafraid of it all.The secret of that big leap is that grace always catches us.Love,hilary

to my someday husband

Dear someday husband,This is not a love letter. Sorry. It's not a letter in which I say gushy things about what I imagine you'll be like, what you'll look like, what our days will be filled with. I'm not blogging a letter to you about you at all, really. I imagine you, of course. I'm 22, and foolish, and a daydreamer. You should laugh at this, because you already know how much trouble it's going to get me into. I will write you a love letter someday. But when I do, I will know who you are and what kind of toothpaste you use. I will know in what order you read the newspaper, and where you first felt at home away from home. I will have made it through the fear that you will walk away. I will write you a letter about you, and all the gushy things about how love changes us, and the good and terrifying thing it is to love and be loved by you. But not right now.I'm writing to you because my sister is getting married tomorrow and in the midst of planning my toast to her and her husband, I thought about marriage. I thought about what makes it beautiful, what makes it mysterious. I thought about what makes it worth doing. Last summer I was in a wedding, and I wrote about the delight I saw in my friend's face as she woke up the morning of her wedding and realized that she was going to unite her life with his, that they were going to become one.I see that same joy in my sister now. I see her smile like she's never smiled before, smile in the safety of her husband, smile in the wonder of him and them and the family they begin tomorrow. I see two people who gather around each other, with prayers and hopes fluttering in a great cloud, and I see love there. Jesus has come to this wedding feast, too.I'm going to be tough to marry. I am fiercely independent and yet desperate to be known. I fight more than is good for me, but I want to be peaceful. I am stubborn. The notion of grace, the kind that's free and deep and that really forgets sin and hurt and mistakes (not conveniently files them away to use in a fight later)? I'm not good at that. I am impatient. I talk too much. I trust this world by flinging my heart open but at the first sign of trouble I am a skittish colt running for the hills.I want to tell you this up front. Marrying me will be hard work. I would say sorry but I'm not really sorry, in the end, because marrying you is the same hard work and it is the kind of good that outweighs hard. My sister and her husband have the same hard work in front of them.They make promises tomorrow. These promises are heavy, filled with love and commitment, filled with the energy of a thousand hot air balloon hopes. I will cry. I cry every time I hear a couple promise that they will love and cherish and be faithful in all things, until they are parted by death. I cry every time I hear someone take their name, and take the other person's name, and in one sentence bind them together.Marriage is a mystery, someday husband. Marriage is a great and daily obedience, the kind that takes everything we've got and then more. The kind that between my stubbornness, and your stubbornness, between my picking fights and your withdrawal, between that trip to Rome and the huge fight in the airport parking lot after that trip to Rome - will be a miracle. I am going to walk down the aisle tomorrow, in a blue dress and borrowed shoes and hair someone did for me. I am going to pray as I go that I learn my sister's courage, her grace, her wisdom. I am going to pray that she is filled with joy, the kind that aches and ages and lasts through everything, even what is unknown. I am going to watch her delight, and share in it.And when you and I are sitting in a kitchen somewhere, silent and reproachful, the oven still smoking from whatever I told you I would make for dinner, I will read this to you. (Just promise not to laugh too hard at everything I get wrong. Okay?)I will remind us that marriage is a great and daily obedience. I will remind us that it is a miracle and a mystery. I will look at pictures of my sister's wedding and remember that when I was twenty-two, when I was at the very beginning, I learned love from watching my sister make a new family. And it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.I will remember that I wished for nothing less for us, nothing but the gut-wrenching beautiful work this is.And I will ask you to forgive me for being so hard to be married to. And I will forgive you for the same thing. And I will look over at you across the burned dinner and laugh. Promise me you'll laugh too? And in our marriage, however far away, we will become a family.Love,hilary (your someday wife)