Nuptials

My daughter got married today. Well, it’s yesterday now. A small crowd of her’s and her husband’s close family were there, in a field, in a state park, under a pavilion and a tent. She has found a wonderful partner from a family who are a very nice bunch of people. It was a wonderful time, and they planned every detail of the event, which came off without a serious hitch.

We’d worried about the weather. We worry in my family. The forecasts were not great in the run up to the event. To be honest, the long term forecast looked quite good two weeks out. But I learned that there are often pretty notable differences between the long-range projections depending on your data source. And as the day approached, the projections began to become more ominous.

The day before, the principal characters in this ceremony met on Zoom to nail down the details. At that point, you could choose which forecast you preferred: the ones that said rain and thunder, the ones that said the day would be clear, and the ones that said there would be a chance of light rain, but something of half a millimeter in total. My son-in-law was extremely optimistic, which I thought… was optimistic.

The next morning, on the day of the event, my son-in-law, his dad, and I met early at the site to set up. The weather was a bit muggy but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. And it remained like that for the early afternoon. The ceremony, conducted by my dear cousin Bob, was heartfelt, full of meaning, and brief. In a word, it was perfect.

The weather remained steady after the ceremony and through lunch (supplied by a food truck that served lobster rolls and other familiar foods that delighted the guests immensely). It was warm. It was quite warm. But it was far from the punishing heat of the early summer a month before. Everyone remarked on how lucky we had been with the weather. We were sweating, but the sky was picture-perfect.

All that was before the clouds rolled in. We saw them to the north at first, as they came up on us quickly. And soon, in the mid-afternoon, people gathered back under the tent, and moved the cornhole game under the pavilion.

Some of us tried to determine how quickly the rain would pass. I looked at the radar on my phone and saw that the clouds were fast-moving, as we had seen in the sky, but that they would break after a short time. The only lightning was supplied by the photographer, who continued to snap flash-photos. Otherwise, it was merely an insistent afternoon sprinkle. The young children in the party laughed and ran in the rain, undeterred. Even delighted.

The rain ceased well-before the mobile ice cream parlor arrived, but the event had been transformed. The little storm had brought a new, welcome breeze with it that washed across the pavilion. This development, almost as much as the ice cream, refreshed the guests.

All the worrying about the weather had been for naught. My son-in-law’s optimism had turned out to be realism. And in the turmoil of the anticipation, the declarations, the pleasant surprise, the advent of the clouds, the interrupting precipitation, and its exit, there is surely a kind of metaphor for a life, or a marriage, or a family, or what’s the difference among those things anyway?

People will make forecasts, heavily-colored by their moods and experiences, as well as their sincere wishes and their baggage. We can hope for perfection, but we’re never wise to expect it. We can remark “how lucky,” but luck is unreliable. Despite the forecasts and luck being on the rise or fall, we can decide how we meet it.

I wish the couple a life that is a happy adventure. I hope that they live it the way they lived their day. We cannot choose the weather. But we can make wonderful plans that guide us, and embrace or weather the unexpected changes with the best people beside us. And we can choose to celebrate beneath the sun and clouds.

And I kind of wish I could have stuffed myself even more with lobster rolls and delightful ice cream sundaes.