On a windy day in late october, our son Jake became engaged to Sara McQuinn. We spent the winter imagining their wedding. Though the pictures shifted, some elements remained constant: a feast, a large table. Intimacy. Stars, firelight and wildflowers. Celtic music. Others changed. The guest list, originally 20 people, grew to 150. A lyrical, solitary harp grew to a group of fiddlers. Could we have both a feast on a hilltop and a dance at the village hall?
Jake and Sara dreamed and designed their celebration. We four parents made practical suggestions, but the young couple clung tenaciously to their vision. It would be a country wedding. If there was a summer storm, then we would let our hair blow in the warm, wet wind. Every flower would come from the fields. We would stand under the stars, not a tent's canvas. Long before the wedding's shape had been envisioned, Jake designed a Celtic knot work for their rings – hounds and hares chasing one another, leaping endlessly, linked by a latticed tangle with neither beginning nor end. The knot work became the wedding's motif, used on invitations, place cards, wine labels, dinner menus; and finally, as if the wedding's rhythm were preordained, it too became a linked succession of events, until the wedding had evolved from a one-day event into two weekends of celebration at the height of wildflower season.
Jake and Sara wanted to be married in the place they plan to make their home, near Sussex, New Brunswick. Their log cabin is a half-mile beyond our farm, at the end of a dirt lane that winds past a pond, dips out of sight, crosses a brook and ends in their yard. After several family ‘wedding meetings' we arrived at a plan that, it seemed, would balance the tender privacy of a family gathering with the exuberance of a ceilidh. On the last Saturday in June, Jake and Sara would plant an oak tree during a marriage ceremony on a high hill overlooking our valley. Only immediate family would attend, 10 people from each side. Afterward we would have a catered feast in the village hall, with so many courses we would finish by candlelight with the spice of balsam wreathing through open windows. The following weekend we'd have a second celebration: a country dance in the same hall, with speeches, wedding cake and wine. We'd invite friends, relatives and neighbours.
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