The Wedding

So many months, indeed years, in the planning and now they are married. And it was beautiful. The day was blue and cloudlessly perfect, the setting overlooking the beach at Laughing Waters was spectacular, and the bride and groom were wonderful, completely and wholly themselves. Their vows were the most tenderly moving I have ever heard. "I choose you" they each said. I wasn't the only one swiping away tears.

The bride, my darling niece, wept as she walked down the grassy aisle between her parents, her groom having walked that same path moments before. He offered his bride a handkerchief as she stepped onto the platform, and everyone laughed. She used it, then handed it back and reached up to straighten his bow tie. We all chuckled again. My daughter was the maid of honor, something the cousins had agreed on as teenagers, and the other bridesmaids were the bride's two sisters and her three best friends from her high school days at Immaculate Conception in Jamaica. The grooms "men" included a grooms woman, one of the groom's best friends from his college days at Macalester in St. Paul, Minnesota. The other groomsmen were the groom's dad, my son, and other friends from college; the entire wedding squad had traveled alongside the happy couple from the start. After the vows were spoken, they all danced back up the aisle. The whole proceeding was bathed in so much love.

And the setting. Oh my. The dance floor was packed until well past midnight, even though the nuptials had begun at 4:30 in the afternoon. The drinks, provided by my brother, the father of the bride, flowed non stop at an open bar, and everyone was in a festive mood. The groom's father, looking on at the rollicking party, said, "Surely they're going to get tired at some point," but the guests on the dance floor never did.

I could go on and on about that marvelous evening. I could tell you that my parents were most certainly with us in spirit, that the driver who transported the wedding party to Laughing Waters was named Lascelles like my father, the bride's grandfather, that my niece has never looked more strikingly like my mother Gloria, her grandmother, whose garnet ring she wore, her something old, her something borrowed. I could wax on about the deep comfort of seeing family members I hadn't held close in too long, about the joy that enveloped everything, about how right it all felt, how inevitable even, but perhaps the pictures can better tell the story. Indulge me. It was hard to choose these few.

 

 

 

Our entire week in Jamaica was chock full of parties, family visits and social engagements. Our immediate family, plus my son's fiancee and my daughter's love, began the week in a villa on the north coast, and ended it in Kingston, where relatives of both bride and groom raised a glass and brought in the new year together in a penthouse suite with a view of the fireworks over the harbor. My cousin from Trinidad had booked it for just that occasion. On Thursday, the day before our family was to fly back to New York City, a large group of us headed out to Hellshire Beach for its famous lobster bake, fried fish and festival. My younger niece, currently a freshman at the groom's alma mater, mused that she was suffering from sensory overload, and we agreed it explained the exhaustion we all felt. Yet we just kept rolling in spite of it, because it was a satisfying kind of tiredness, threaded with the sweet sense of showing up for one another. There are pictures of those other events, too, but that's an album for another day.