Dear Baby

A Letter to Our Unborn Child

Dear Baby,

You have never seen a balsam tree flagging in the mountain wind; nor have you observed how the juniper’s roots cling to the high-hung granite of ancient cliffs. Never have you placed your tiny foot down gingerly upon the floating mosses in the primeval and fog-wrapped bogs — feeling their spongey hairs press down into the icy, root-brown waters below. And the flight of the crow as she picks apart the roadside carrion in the hoary, glimmering subzero dawnlight: today, you do not have the faculties to dream of such things, even distantly.

Like the juniper clenching the gneiss of great, barren peaks — you, dear baby, are now holding fast to your mother in the warm, blanketed wigwam of her womb; barely cognizant that you yourself are alive. Just as ancient rivers dribble along in vernal pools and beaver meadows, mumbling incoherent songs to themselves if only to test the stone and soil for some proof of their own life — you sputter and move your tiny fingers, in a sleep so deep and perfect that no adult could ever conceive of it. Just an inch or two of your mother’s strong and vibrant flesh protects you from the bite of winter winds; you are ensconced in a private heaven that neither I nor your dear mother will ever see or know.

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Many years ago, I took a hitchhiking ride from a mortuary specialist in Indiana — a funeral home expert who embalms the corpses of dead men for a living. He was a jolly fellow, an effortless conversationalist who had a healthy hunger to tipple a bit of gin as he drove — but he was no dark-eyed drunk. He told me, “it wasn’t until I was in mortuary school that I learned about what’s inside of me.” He looked up into the oncoming headlights in the windshield and threw back a tidy sip from his bottle, saying — “it was only then that I realized I would never see my own heart, nor my lungs or liver or stomach. Though I rely on them, they are impossible to see with my own eyes.”

He paused for a while with serious eyes. Then he said:

“This was when I began to believe in God — for isn’t God a little bit like that?”

At the time, I was unable to understand what he meant. I was too naive, too ‘green,’ too foolhardy and self-assured. It was only later that it came to me: We rely upon unseen forces to sustain us in everything we do. Our spleen and galbladder and spine are the pillars of our very life, and yet we cannot confirm them but by the grim effort of hacking apart the dead, or in dissections in laboratories. Even then — the organs we may get an eyeful of are not our own. Or perhaps we could photograph our insides with cameras and X-Rays, but what is a photograph of a bone before the skull held in one’s hand? A picture has none of the same gravity, at least to my mind.

It seemed to me that the good and gentle mortician was correct. Our own interior is, to put it simply — permanently unknowable. And in this, a potent metaphor for understanding God is contained.

But to you, my dear infant, that unseeable interior is now your home and resting place. You are growing in the deepest depths of a woman whose virtues and thousand-faceted beauties are still not known to you. At this early hour in your life on earth, you cannot yet understand such things. But you will understand them, my little friend. You will come to love her as much as I do — perhaps you will love her even more than I can. For now, every sip of water she has is also yours; every breath she takes in her nightly rest is shared with you. When she tumbles in the snow and laughs — her motion and laughter is yours as well. The both of you are now living in unison, and the fact that one day the cord connecting you to her will be cut shall not change this happy fact of nature and divinity, not then, not after, and not ever.

She will never be separated from you for as long as you live — even when you are old, standing with somber eyes above her flowered grave, you will be with her. I can hardly conceive of such strange, dark, faraway beauty as you will know then, but I believe you will someday learn of it.

What happens between now and then is the story of your life. It could be tempting to imagine that not so much as a word of that story has been written yet — but this would be mistaken. For your mother and I have already written the prologues (two of them; one for each of us) and the introduction’s final stanzas are now being penned. The forests of paper on which you will write your story are growing now in our mountains and glades — and fine ink in a thousand colors is already flowing in giant springs and waterfalls for you to someday bottle up and carry to the desk that I will build for you.

Yes, you will spring from the womb, God willing, in perfect health. You will learn to lift your head and taste the wind with your toothless gums like a baby bird opens the beak in the breeze. In your world, there will be milk and sleep and your mother’s familiar beating heart — your hair will thicken upon your scalp more quickly than any of us realize. By falltime, it will tousle in the chilly air, and your eyes will be bright as embers — hungrily gazing at the cascading river rapids and blowing leaves; hovering above the great big bowls of cut apples and at the glistening bloody stew meat in the sizzling pot as if it were all too much to take in at one time.

Even then, at so early an hour, your personality will be a thing you make known with your every faculty. To be a sober-eyed babe or a frenzied, swooningly romantic sort of infant, or perhaps to be taken with moving things or music or words — such things are the dealer’s choice, and the dealer is heavenly God. Each development will be another pillar in the storied citadel you have already begun to build. Each trace of whatever should make you a unique portrait of the Lord’s own holy Face will burst forth as another piece of your life story’s skeleton — and it will endure and last and burn brightly as your years spring ever onward.

Your first steps will open a portal into an entirely new world, too. Now, the world’s characters will pop out at you as you bumble along in the yard and on the riverbank under your father’s watchful eyes — the falcon and the beaver, the ‘peeper’ frogs of the swamps, the sharp-thorned brambles and giant stately hemlocks who rest magnanimously upon carpets of daisies and mushrooms. Chunky babies and waggish little chickens — wrinkly uncles and bus-drivers and friends with beaming bright faces. There will be summer days when the goat’s squarish eye is your portal to wonderment — when sleeplessness leads your gaze upward to the cream-soaked galaxies and stars seated high at the summit of your first midnights.

Slippery stone and algae in the creek bed will teach you to move with patience and gentleness — but not without your taking a few terrible falls! But soon, you will be a lithe, muscular, stripling little creature who can slip into small places that are yours alone and deftly climb trees us older people would find unclimbable! On cedar canoes, you’ll nap a princely sort of nap below the mosquito nets, hearing the clucking of the geese and the rippling of the riverwater upon the bow. Scaly brook trout, strange-smelling beaver fur; sticky spruce gum and skipping stones — what wonders! And by eveningtime, leather-bound storybooks will be opened like springwater cataracts to slip behind — into cool, cleansing, impossible worlds even more fanciful than the one we share together by the light of the sun.

You will note that the old, gay sun seems to persist in rising; that the rain never hesitates to fall, sometimes for weeks and weeks at a time — and the blackflies never cease in troubling you. And so you will earn a raincoat and a bug net, and perhaps in time even a jacknife and a tomahawk. Fishing line and bicycles, my friend, snacks in the library and a little coracle to paddle around the river yourself; these are riches you will learn about in good time. By then, you will have your tastes and preferences — you may become fascinated with Greenlandic Vikings or freight trains or turtlenecks; you may wish to become a stone mason, or a vintner, or a sailor, or even a great Saint of a Priest. Your long walkabouts in the forest will yield pages and pages of words and drawings in notebooks — and we shall take them rather seriously, for they may indeed be the dreams that you live.

By then, no doubt, I’ll be in serious need of your scholarship so far as dreams go, so do not fail me! For from all I have ever learned, men grow bitter and dreamless with age — and I may very well need to borrow your notes and take a few cues from you insofar as fantasies are concerned. I quite suspect that many of them will be more doable than you might think at first! And so we shall do them — building catapults and rafts and lighting great big pine trees aflame! Or, if you are a girl-child, the order of the day may be doll furnishings and spindles and fanciful thrones; perhaps you and I will construct the tiniest working woodstove that has ever been made for a dollhouse — and on it, we shall boil the tiniest maple candies in the world.

You will, doubtless, bring your mother and I a great many tests as well. Breaking the glass plates — tossing the jarful of cream into the garden to smash! Perhaps you will attempt to add some color to your language — or to snatch a dollar from your father’s pocket! No matter; for this is all just another way to learn about your world. You will find that this type of learning is not preferable to the tough lessons that gravity teaches, nor is it an improvement upon the harsh teacher of winter chill or stinging bees! But you will learn, as I and your mother did at a similar age, and for it, we both quite hope that you will grow into a truly wise and perhaps even downright orderly little creature.

If all of this seems like a good deal ‘too much,’ well, I will let you in on a secret you may not realize — all of this that I am describing here is only Chapter One of your story. It is only one tiny fleck of the full, long, blessed life we pray you will live — but it is the foundation of all the rest.

Realizing this, my dear baby, you must understand that your mother and I have sought to provide you with the amplest foundation a human soul could ever receive! Before your conception, little fellow, I traveled the whole of the country, excluding nothing in my voyages — seeing practically every corner of the Continental United States that I was able to see.

I succeeded in seeing most of it, and came to conclude that there is nowhere better in the world than the Adirondack Park, where you will be born and raised. Our forests are wild and ancient; surly and un-tamed — their swamps are inpenetrable and their towering firs and maples herald a pure and splendid song that dispels every inkling of doubt from man’s heart. Frogs and pine martens, bears and moose, ten-mile tracts of blackberries, and clean, untouched waters glistening for miles down seldom-seeen streams. These lands will feed you and teach you all you could ever wish to know; they will become synonymous with the bones within your own body and their rhythm will be the music to which your own heart moves forever.

If you doubt this, only take a moment to consider your dear old father — for I grew up here, too. While I left many a time, and traveled exceedingly far, these forests did not ever leave me; and I am wise enough now to know that I will die here. Perhaps there is no greater gift that I can give to you, my dear, than to raise you in the same woods that I knew as a boy, for they are one of the rarest sorts of things — the sort of a place that can never fail you.

Tomorrow, your mother and I will go to a lawyer’s office in the snow-covered downtown of a northerly town — and we will present them with $33,000 in exchange for the keys to the house in which you will, God willing, be born. It is a lovely little place; a few sturdy bedrooms and a big front porch — a kitchen with a woodstove and a little yard for growing cabbages and onions. Only a few paces to the south, a raging river flows, and in the springtime, you may hear this torrential waterfall in the distance out your bedroom window. Downstream, a thousand acres of public land — your land — lay for us to explore; and by the time you are in the blossoming years of your childhood, I shall run a trapline there, harvesting pelts of fur in which to clothe you in.

Further on, blackberries and venison and trout-holes galore are found in the endless public woods; islands to camp on, miles of river to paddle on, tiny beaches where you may learn to swim — all of it awaits.

Up the street, too, there is a little white Church where you will be Baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Here, you will be taught about the incredible author of all the beauty that teems and blossoms within our dear old forests. God has thought of you, my child, before anyone else did; He has made you in His own image — He has crafted you as another scintillating reflection of His own Holy Face. And some two-thousand years ago, in a faraway land, this good God who made the mountains high and created the trees and the turkeys and the blackbirds gave mankind His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ. This simple, beautiful, perfect Man was God; He was perfect, and we must strive to become as He is. Loving, charitable, kind, one who creates beauty and uplifts the souls of the despondent and the forgotten — we will beg His visitation upon our house; and upon you, dear child, that you might rise to the impossible, beautiful, maddeningly perfect task of doing His will.

To follow Him is to suffer — but in all good things, there is at least a little bit of suffering. Sometimes, it is a lot. And you will learn of this, many years from today. You will see the wounds of the homeless and the rashes of the dying; the needles of the addicted and the living hell endured by the poor, lustful, immoral, and the greedy. You will see it and weigh it and it will crush you; but we must urge you not to look away, nor to numb your heart to it. I will teach you courage upon stiff rapids and high cliffs, before the rifle aimed at the giant buck and the long walk in frightening darkness — not to help you master these things but to arm you with the courage to see suffering and know hope. For the one who is calm before the darkness is pliant in the loving hands of God; the little angels and Saints among us who do not shudder at the despondency of his brothers and sisters burns like a perfect candle — warming them, feeding them, consoling them, and in so doing, these little ones console Christ Jesus as He is nailed upon the Cross for our sins.

We have hope, dear baby, that you will someday know these things and answer to them bravely — for the world into which you will soon be born is often a tortured, heinous, distressingly sad sort of place. So dark are the times we are living in that there are many who say we should protect you from them by not allowing you to be born at all. But so great is the loving hope of our Creator that you will be born; and if God should grant it, you will not be born alone either, but will be accompanied by numerous brothers and sisters who will aid you in your task.

Of course I am shedding tears as I write this — because the story of your life has not only been written already in so many of the ways that I have described, but has also been foreordained by sin and darkness. It is no fun and lighthearted realization for you to come to grips with this, as I and your mother know well (for we had to do it ourselves as well) — but you must not lose sight of the simple, joyous, heart-filling truth that where there is darkness, there is an opportunity to love. And God Himself is love, as you will, I pray, someday learn. And so we must teach you courage, little one, courage! And courage you will learn high upon Adirondack mountains and far up flooded, raging streams. When the lessons have been learned — there will be pie for you by the woodstove, and the loving arms of your mother and I.

But these days are so far off now; they cannot trouble me, nor can they touch you just yet. Let us not lose sight of the fantastical days we have ahead of us — of the incredible fun and delight that sprouts up around every corner of the beautiful fields and forests that surround our home. There are a million incredible, brilliant things to learn and do; good things to eat, songs to sing, Masses to attend, Christmases and sunny days with ice cream and big, wild leaps into clean, fish-filled rivers.

Yes — teething and sleepless nights, broken cookie-jars and dirty diapers, frightful tantrums and food tossed onto the kitchen floor — there will be the tough days. But for you, I know that it is worth it, though we haven’t met just yet. I cannot imagine that the good artist of a God who made the hills and springs and trees has made you in vain. Lord help me never to lose sight of this happy likelihood — for in life, there is hope, and what are the bones of hope if not love? In love of you, our child, the future thrives, and the unseen beauty that lay at the heart of our world is sustained. What more could I ever dream to know and experience and achieve? What better way to live than this could there ever be?

And so it is that we are thinking of you dearly already.

Looking forward to meeting you,

Your Father, A.M. Hickman.