dear hilary: your twenty two year old self

Dear Hilary,You turn 22 today. Happy birthday, sweet pea. It's an exciting moment in your story. Another year, another step in the midst of your real, wild, precious life. This time last year you wrote a letter to yourself to try and teach yourself lessons for the future. You wanted to learn how to be patient, how to laugh, how to remember the moon rising over the Atlantic or the feeling of your muscles carrying you home.And here we are, a year later. How we grow is not best measured in years. It's a tangled, unlikely journey. You've grown much more and much less than you think. You won't really know what the last year was until you're telling someone years from now, when "Stubborn Love" by The Lumineers plays on the radio and you smile.But the very first Dear Sugar column you read (funny, isn't it? That wasn't very long ago) was from a 22 year old. It was called "Tiny Beautiful Things" and it changed your life. And now a book by the same name is on its way to you. Dear Sugar's letter was asking for advice. What would you tell yourself at 22? It seemed like the right moment, now, to write that letter.Give more than you have. When someone asks you to take a walk with them and they hold their heart out, trembling and raw, to you, take it gently. Sometimes you must give it back to them. Sometimes you must hold it in your hands and not let go. Not even when you don't know what to do and you are screaming in your head that you are only 22 and you don't know anything! Not knowing and still holding on is the gift.You are not your college transcript. You are not the silver bowls gathering dust next to your brother's Star Wars battleships - not the awards, not the opportunities, not even the ones you are most proud of. Laugh, Hilary. How could those things be the sum of who you are? You are alive and growing. There aren't boxes or categories to contain you. If your heart feels left behind, remember that love is never wasted, only given a new purpose. Remember that disappointed hopes are still beautiful. Remember that most of the work you were meant to do was in the hoping, not the coming true. Don't work too much. There is enough time. Not everything you touch is urgent.You are most wise when you admit you have no earthly idea what the hell you're going to do. You are closest to the truth when you lie in your bed sweating on a July night and whisper to Jesus that He'll have to fix it, because you can't.You aren't really very old, sweetheart. So dance to "Hello" and for goodness' sake, will you please stop worrying about how you look? It's the time you forgot your makeup and didn't care that you were the most radiant. It's the joy you have in your body and your heart that's beautiful.Call even if they don't call you back. Write letters. Do not waste your time on less than real love. Sugar's right: it moves freely in both directions. Set yourself free from trying to earn it. Give it to others as much as you possibly can, and then more.Be brave enough to be empty. Be braver than you think you need to be. And yes, you'll keep learning this over and over. Desire and heartache and confusion and courage can't be mastered in a day. Or a year. You will relearn everything a hundred times.It's a gorgeous world and a broken one. But it is your one wild life, love. Spend your heart in it. Love,hilary

for the brother and the red truck

"Wanna drive?"I ask him hesitantly, kicking imaginary dust off the step. He looks at me, and shrugs. "Yeah, sure. I'd be up for that." I backtrack, immediately skeptical. "You don't have to! You can't just - yeah. You don't have to." He shakes his head at me, and stands up, stretching his long arms towards the pink sky. "Hil. Let's go. I'll get the key."We drive without talking for a while, Eric Church and Jason Aldean our companions through the emptied suburb streets. He has one hand on the wheel and I can just see a bit of his brown cowboy boots peeking out from beneath his dirty jeans. This is the brother who spends his days in the sun, working grounds, mowing and pruning and planting. This is the brother who puts his callused hands to the ground and takes care of things. I shift in my seat next to him, crossing and uncrossing my legs under me. I start to say something. "Can I ask you a -" but suddenly my lip is trembling and I feel like crying and I can't control myself. It sounds so stupid.He looks over as we pull up to the stop sign. "Hil? What's up?" I look out the window. He's my younger brother, I say to myself. How can I be this stupid in front of him? I want to be laughing and wise. I want to be the one who gives him the advice, who tells him the truth, who teaches him about life. But I'm still sniffling and now we're driving through a development, the same five year old maple leaves brushing against the truck. He waits."I just... I'm sad. I'm sad about - you know." He nods. A rough hand touches my shoulder for a second, and returns to the wheel. "I know. But you know, Hil, you're great. And if he doesn't see that, and if he doesn't want it, and if she keeps saying those things... well. I promise, it's because there's more going on inside them that you can't understand. But you are still you." He pauses, looks out his window. "I love you, Hil."And as he flicks on the blinker to veer home, I am crying for a different reason. My brother is wiser than anyone else I know. He is a nineteen year-old truck driving cowboy man, who takes care of things, who makes me sing Eric Church at the top of my lungs on the way home from church, who finds me in tears late one night after a fight with a friend and walks with me while I sob about how much words hurt.I can't hide from the brother and his red truck. I can't be the perfect older sister. I can't pretend to have all the answers. He teaches me, takes care of me, reminds me of the truth more often than I remind him. Sometimes the greatest blessings are the younger siblings who drive us through suburbs and hold us while we cry and come looking for our hearts when we try to hide them. Sometimes, the richest witness of Christ's love is your younger brother in his red truck.Love,hilary

to my someday daughter

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 daughter,I'm writing this to you before I know you. You and I are family, and we will always be family, but before I bear the weight and wonder of being your mom, I'm a 21 year-old girl making her first steps in the world. I'm single now, so I haven't married your dad, and I'm in my very first job after college. Every morning I get up and groan, because I'm not an early riser and it takes all my willpower to stagger towards that first cup of coffee. But you'll change that for me, with your hunger and your need and your soft, sweet self. You'll change so many things for me.I want to write you this letter telling you about being a girl, a daughter and sister and how in this first years of being a grownup it's hard. I'm not very good at it, sweetheart. I mess up a lot. I don't call my friends back sometimes, or I forget birthdays, or I snap at my parents and wish my siblings would stay out of my hair. I don't really know how to manage a budget or figure out when to say "no." I'm all tangled up, and I have a thousand questions for every answer I get. When you get here, to being a 21 year-old, I want you to find this again and laugh because your mom was a tangled mess and then show it to me. I promise, I'll remember to have grace for you.I fell in love with writing letters years ago. I stuck them in the mailboxes of my friends in high school (yes, Aunt Lillie got many of them, which I know you'll find someday in the box of precious things I keep next to my side of the bed). I wrote them to teachers, to people I barely knew, thanking them for being them. It's been the most wonderful kind of writing I've ever done, and when I write to your siblings, now or in the future, there is nothing I want to do more than tell you how much I love you or how extraordinary you are or how amazed I still am at how our words carry love with them. I want you to know this, beautiful girl. I want you to know that your words have the power to offer love to a hurting world. I want you to know that often, it is that smile you smile and the, "I love you, Mom" that breaks my heart right open.I've been imagining writing this to you for a while. Right now in my life the closest I get to children are the beautiful girls I get to babysit. They're going to be big when you arrive, years after I rocked them in the hallways of their parents' houses. But when I held them, and learned to feed them Cheerios and make silly faces, when I learned to play "Winter Song" and "Poison & Wine" on repeat 167 times, God was preparing me for you. I'm learning how to love you, even now, when I don't know you. I don't know how He does that. But somehow, He does.I'm lost when it comes to love, too, at this moment in my life. I want it, but I don't know what it looks like. I'm learning to keep my heart open and at the same time safe. I'm learning to be patient. I have many days when I drive home from work, through the same roads and looking at the same sunset, and I wonder, "Where is he?" And I am sure someday you'll wonder that too. I promise that when you ask me, I will tell you what my mom, what Gram, tells me now: When it lights, it lights. She always laughed when she said it, and smiled at Granddad. They're teaching me every day to laugh and trust, and I will try to teach you, too.I promise I will love you even when you break things that I told you not to touch. I promise I will love you when you sneak out of the house and put me and your dad in a total panic. I promise to leave the office and pick you up at school when you get sick. I promise to make your dance recital costume even though I can't sew to save my life (I guess I promise to learn how to sew before you arrive), and buy you new soccer cleats or a lacrosse stick or an extra copy of the script for Hamlet when you lose yours. I promise, love, to be a safe harbor for you. I promise your dreams are big and beautiful and even though I can't imagine what great things you'll do, I promise to remind you that God's love is more powerful than anything in this world. He has good plans for you, love, and I promise His love will carry you even in the days when my love and Dad's love and Aunt Abby and Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe and all the rest of this crazy family's love can't.Until I meet you, I promise to learn everything I can from the wise people in my life. I promise to be a 21 year-old and mess up and learn from it. I promise to soak in the world and read good books and dream about being a provost and apply to grad schools. I'll seek the truth and fall into grace.And when you find this someday, we will laugh over it and remember that love crosses all kinds of distances, even time.Love,hilary (your someday mom)

an ode to hard things (poetic friday/saturday, week three)

Poetic Friday/Saturday means I must put different words to my thoughts - words carefully chosen, weeded out from their neighbors, words that sit in a strange order and meet each other in an unexpected rhythm. Poetry is the wondrous music of loving words. Won't you share your poetry too (I'd love to read it)?an ode to the hard things (by Hilary Sherratt)I love you:hearts I can’t understanddoors that lock and boltocean of time and separationwind shattering a window in a storm.It is winter,rain lashes at my face in early morning.My boots drip onto the new pavement.I carry youe questions in my wide eyes.Then I bless you: the hard things no one wishes for –you with your achesand bruises, with your wonderingand missingand cryingand forfeitingand defeat.You are the oyster shells of the world:I see your pearl.And one from a favorite poet of mine:

The Thing Is

by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it evenwhen you have no stomach for itand everything you've held dearcrumbles like burnt paper in your hands,your throat filled with the silt of it.When grief sits with you, its tropical heatthickening the air, heavy as watermore fit for gills than lungs;when grief weights you like your own fleshonly more of it, an obesity of grief,you think, How can a body withstand this?Then you hold life like a facebetween your palms, a plain face,no charming smile, no violet eyes,and you say, yes, I will take youI will love you, again.

Love, hilary