Although my notebook filled (as did Sara's and her mother's) with pages and pages of details – (to make: tablecloth, willow wreath, kilt socks, wine; to buy; to order; to do...) I felt calm. As I bent over my knitting, needles carrying loop after loop of wool for Jake's knee socks, I thought of how, in this rural community, life is predicated upon the value of ritual and the necessity of helping one another. No matter how unusual our celebration, its spirit would be like a familiar song each person would take up as its melody reached them. No matter how many pieces seemed unfinished (the sword Jake was making to wear with his kilt, goblets still to be fired in Peter's kiln, seats to be built on the hay wagon, the caterer to find a wild boar, and whether Jake's childhood schoolbus driver could drive the couple to their inn), all the pieces would coalesce and many hands would help bring to fruition the events we imagined over and over, reciting wedding and dance to one another as if memorizing choreography.
Late on the afternoon of June 24th, the wedding party climbed onto a hay wagon. Pulled by a tractor made festive with crepe paper and spruce boughs, we rode through the fields, catching tantalizing glimpses of Sara, who drifted through an upper meadow, shifting her course erratically, like a butterfly, as she picked her bridal bouquet, bending, straightening, a green cape rippling from her shoulders. We arrived at the top of the hill, where days earlier Sara and I had stood as she described to me how she would walk up through the buttercups. I thought how seldom it is that we see the thing that someone desires actually come to pass; for here she came, the piper walking down to meet her, wind lifting the spruce boughs and flowers bending forward as if stroked by an invisible hand. Jake's walk, paralleling Sara's, had brought him to the forest's edge, and now he strode out to meet his bride. We stood within a circle of young oaks as my father performed the ceremony, the couple placed rings on one another's hands, planted the oak tree and then sat at a small table next to the barrister, who had come in full court robes to make the wedding legal.
Back on the wagon, we proceeded down from the hilltop, past the pond and on to the village hall. As dusk gathered, we began the feast at the great oblong table, every place setting decorated with vases of daisies, clover and buttercups, silver glittering in the light of 60 candles, bouquets of lilac and honeysuckle on every windowsill. It was a true feast, lasting four hours, made decorous by its spacing, each of 10 courses separated by interludes of poetry, memories or blessings offered by each of 10 couples. Candlelight doubled in the tall windows and through the open door we could see the sky silvered with stars. As we gathered around the car that had come to take Jake and Sara away, the hall glowed with soft, steady light, and there was no sound but the running of river water. Sara paused before stepping into the car and said, wonderingly, “You said it wouldn't be perfect. But it was.”
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