So we did it.  I have never had more fun at short notice than this.  We had a lovely gathering.  First, my sister, my brother and my niece arrived, late on Friday night. Then, my friends showed up, including Carol, my best friend in the whole world (starting when I was 15), and her husband Bruce who drove my mother down from Ottawa.  (She got my mother to go on a road trip!) My other best friend Siobhan and my great friend Mark (who married Siobhan just a few years ago) drove from Toronto.   Our wonderful friends Peter and Dana from Essex Junction where we have the sweat built came, our awesome friends Kitty and Gary from Rhode Island, our amazing friend Gina from NYC, who knew we were in love almost before we did, our great friend Magili from Maine and her husband Ted and our favorite person-under-three, Marisol.  Finally, Lewis’s long time friend Peter, friend through thick and thin, co-teacher, who fortunately was ordained, was able to come to perform the ceremony. We live in Brattleboro, VT., in a small place with no guest room. Down the road from us, right by the frog pond, is the Meadowlark Inn (meadowlarkinnvt.com).    We turned our house over to friends, and moved into the bed and breakfast.

I had a dress.  Well, I had four.  I have fortunately discovered the thrift store in Keene, Sal’s Thrift Avenue, and had picked up a frock or two there for Christmas and New Year’s.  Plus Brattleboro has really good thrift and antique stores, and I happened to find a black and red number that worked well.  I like to get advice on things like this, so I recruited my own personal What Not to Wear group who could advise me. At the last minute, I went to our outlet mall by the highway ramp and found a nice short one-shoulder white dress and a pair of matching shoes.  On Friday night, we had those who had arrived over for a dinner of pulled pork and greens from our local co-op, and then Saturday morning, while I vacuumed and did laundry (why?  I don’t know, just because when the going gets tough the tough do laundry), I also had my sister and niece over to pick the dress.  Excellent advice later, we went with the white.  They helped out extraordinarily, running errands.  I had ordered a chocolate cake from our local bakery, gluten free, and had got little packages of wine and local products (cheese and chocolate) for those who were making the trek, so we put those in the rooms (along with the moose slippers we found for Marisol). A week isn’t long enough for monogrammed balloons or engraved invitations!  Lewis had apparently invited some people for a ‘Christmas Party’ planning to surprise them in case I said yes. Everyone else began arriving on Saturday afternoon, and we all gathered at the bed and breakfast and headed into town for dinner at the Fireworks restaurant.  As we had only made our reservation on Tuesday, they had kindly accommodated us but had only a table for 12, so we squished in the other 4 and had a merry time. Then home to bed early.

On Sunday, we got up early to do more errands, and sent Kitty and Gary and Gina scurrying back and forth to get things we forgot – they were awesome and had an incredible sense of humour.  Thank you guys.  We had come up with a ceremony and we ran it by Peter. We decided to make a bundle and had emailed people on Wednesday to invite them to contribute words or little things. We had also emailed Peter, our friend from Essex Junction, who had once spontaneously played Lewis and I a love song over breakfast  It’s a beautiful song with words from Rumi, and he wonderfully agreed to play it during the ceremony.  Incredibly and again wonderfully Peter Blum, who plays the singing bowls, offered to bring his, so we said yes and thank you.  After cramming my hair into an up-do, dimming with foundation the bags under my eyes and squeezing into the spanx, I threw on my dress and my lovely mother gave me away (or, rather, brought and presented me – we didn’t like the implications that I could be given away).  The ceremony was wonderful, with music and gathering the bundle and prayers and singing and lovely words.  And, when it was over, we all went down to Gillies fish market restaurant at the bottom of the hill.  My sister had prepared a powerpoint presentation with pictures and stories from when we were young, and it made me cry. She was very kind. When we came back, the lovely women who own the B and B had tidied everything up, so we took up a collection to put in the housekeeping envelope at the end of our stay.

The next morning, Lewis had to go back to work!  I spent some time with my mother and brother, my sister and niece went straight back, and gradually we were left gently alone, feeling sweetly sad to say so many goodbyes.

So, we are married.  I am licensed to wife!  We are very happy, though the implications for immigration are dawning on us, and I might not be going to Australia this year.  But that’s for a different story. Meanwhile, we are so very happy, and feel so very loved. Thank you all so much.

Rain

Those last two days. I believe when I left you all I was speeding back down the highway. The night I left Becky’s, I stayed in Buffalo, Wyoming, which is apparently where the ‘hole in the wall’ gang had their hole in the wall, though there is a place called Wall, SD., that Lewis thinks in the place, so I have to weigh the evidence of tourist information with a SD loyalist.

The staff was sulky at Holiday Inn Express, O’Neill, NE,  and the workout room with the bad equipment in it was locked and I was also feeling post-partum depression on leaving the trip part of the road trip, and Becky’s place, and not doing the Inipi and instead heading out to the Irish Capital of Nebraska….

The next morning, I did leave early. It was a day of only driving. In my mind, I had wondered if pushing forward to Council Bluffs would have been a good idea, but it took a long time to get there, and in fact it would have been a detour, so I just headed through to the I80 and enjoyed the good weather.  The truck was handling well, though I was stopping frequently to pump up the driver’s side rear tire, and to pump up the gas. I was back in NPR territory, so I caught up on the speculation about Pakistan and the current tension there due to the recent air strike, listened to an interview with Judy Blum, the legal struggles of the Occupy Movement and increasingly dire reports about The Weather.

It was hard to imagine the bad weather at first, since I was enjoying such lovely vistas and rapid passage, however, by the end of the day I had entered into the Chicago bad weather zone.   I had planned to drive until 1opm, in order to make good time.  I had thought that if I could get just a little further, I could give myself an easy day. Lewis was flying from Hungary, so we enjoyed talking to each other more freely on Skype as he waited in the Budapest airport. I told him that I had booked a room on Hotwire for Toledo and thought I would get there about midnight, and I was soooo excited to see him the next day, on Tuesday night.

Somewhere in there, it started to rain. Really, really rain. Rain so that I couldn’t see when trucks drove by. Rain so that I fishtailed just a little when they went past, just enough to bring back memories of the black ice in Montana. Rain so that I started going slow. So slow, that all my plans, to see Kit, to see Kevin, where starting to look hard to fit in. Finally, I had to stop, being soo tired. I was not yet in Toledo, but I was out of juice. To make matters worse, my tummy, which had forgiven me much, was finally beginning to rebel against the caffeine candies, 5-hour shots, ginseng and good old coffee.  This all resulted in me, sitting in the driving rain, at a truck stop, finally just falling asleep.  I slept a good 4 hours and woke up at 0330.  I was still happy.  I felt incredibly good at 0330, like I could drive forever, but the reality was that as soon as I got going, the rain, dark, slidiness all got to me. I pulled over again at 0630, still in the dark, but having passed through 3 more hours of the brutal conditions. I slept again.

The day continued like this. I drove until it was  bad idea, stopped, started.  I took the I80, to avoid ‘the lake effect’ and because the GPS said it was shorter. The highways were wide and roamed through the mountains and into the Hudson Valley.  The truck fishtailed, the rain poured, the trucks zoomed past and time crawled. It grew dark.  The road went high up, with signs boasting about its elevation. It zoomed downwards, and my memories of Montana came back until I had low-grade PTSD about going downhill.  Only the thought of getting there and seeing Lewis kept me going. And it did get easier. Lewis landed in Hartford and went to the hotel and kept me company for the last little bit.  The rain poured and poured but NPR had a great interview with the guy who wrote the Phantom Tollbooth, with stories about how he met Jules Pfeiffer, the illustrator, and the story behind the book and Lewis got to the hotel and at a certain point when I was getting close he began reading me the menu from the hotel restaurant.  And I finally got there, at about 2130, stopped the truck at the Hartford Airport and got out to a tremendous hug.  We went and had seafood soup and a bison burger and compared stories of the past ten days.

In the morning, we got up and drove back to Brattleboro. I unloaded the truck, went to the storage locker, and contributed to Lewis’s happiness while he re-discovered his bits of life.  I thought about Rocky Crocker at that moment, who had tried so hard to get the things into Saskatchewan.  These things have had much effort devoted to them.

And, when I arrived, and possibly, I suspect, because I nearly fell of a mountain, he brought up again the idea of marriage. Lewis has asked me to marry him three times in the past years (I have three lovely rings, mostly from the Albuquerque airport, all with bits missing because the stones have fallen out).) We had it in mind as something to do one day maybe in the distant future. This night, he asked me to marry him specifically on December 11th. Apparently, he has been doing some planning. Apparently he has planned a party!

So, I said yes.

So Many Bungees