Union Made

One year ago today, Adam and I scaled a hill in Vermont and got married. The only witness to the event was Anne, the Justice of the Peace whom we'd met for the first time that afternoon. Anne carried a folder with the wedding vows we had emailed from the previous day's Amtrak stopover in Schenectady. We wrote the vows on my laptop, in the memorial chapel of Schenectady's (appropriately named) Union College.

I carried up the hill a riotous bouquet of lilacs, which, minutes before the ceremony, our motherly B&B host had cut, bound with ribbon, and thrust into my arms. Rita found us alarmingly under-prepared for matrimony, not having thought to arrange for flowers, photos, or even wedding guests. Although Adam and I were formally attired, I hadn’t had time or money enough to get matching shoes. And so I wore under my dress a pair of scuffed black pumps—happily discarded once we had settled in the grassy carpet of the sunny hillside.

After declaring us hitched, Anne scampered down the hill ahead of us. She wanted us to have a moment alone, she said. We beamed, blinked, and breathed the green. In the farmhouse below, Rita and Malcolm prepared the party that was to mark our wedding and their eleventh anniversary. You might say they thought of everything. Champagne. Roses. A heart-shaped cake. String quartet on the boombox. We loved them for their kindness, but felt more wedding-y on the next day’s impromptu nature hike, with Anne.

With wedding vows, it seems, we blindly/heroically promise the impossible, in so far as it is impossible to know what people we will become or in what circumstances we will find ourselves. That's one reason I'm partial to the totally private wedding ceremony preceding (or in place of) the more public one. The best vows function not as a tether rope, but as a constitution. A constitution that declares attachment, commitment, affection, passion—and what we intend all that healthful stuff will mean in our common lifetime. When we wrote our vows, I realized how much Adam and I believe in words, and in their ability to create, or at least make possible, a hoped-for ideal. We labored over every phrase, such that our actual wedding, the actual knitting together of our lives, may also have taken place at Union College. As it has taken place in all our intentional conversations, both before and after the day called anniversary.