the Thursday before the Saturday

Even if you are like me -- a person who never entertains huge crowds if she can help it -- you'll understand that I can't help but get excited by the descent and congregation of friends and families for the event of my daughter's wedding. And I don't mean just my friends (though their coming to town is monumentally important to me -- hear that, Diane, Ernest and Barbara??). I do also like my girls' friends. Maybe because they make my daughters happy or maybe because they're all so damn spirited and funny and incredibly loyal to each other that I find myself wondering why it is that one loses the ability to pump joy so quickly and spontaneously into every hour when one gets older? It's as if it becomes an insult to the severity of our various hardships to let out a giggle every now and then.

Thursday is a hellishly busy day for me and this one starts way too early, as Isis -- whom we (unfortunately) did not kick out of the farmhouse last night -- asserted himself now and then in the middle of the night. Still, it was good to feel Ed closer to his old self. His getting up for the cat, or picking up the laptop in the middle of the night and smuggling it to bed -- these are things I'm used to and I can groan and sigh, but none of it bothers me really. Sleep is something to make up the next night if you don't get enough the night before.

I ride Rosie to work on this cool but bright (almost) fall day, feeling like maybe life isn't so complicated after all.





By the time I am into my fourth hour of lecturing, I am horse and I explain to my class that in between today's lectures I spent time rehearsing my (short) wedding toast in the quiet of my office. They want to hear it, but I decline. I need to save the freshness of it. I need to keep it tightly in my heart until I let it go after the wedding.


And then the day is over and I am at my girl's home again, finishing cuttings and pastings, now in the company of my littlest one (who is up from Chicago for the festivities and to fulfill her Maid of Honor obligations) and in the company of their closest friends.


I'm writing now from the farmhouse, after a repeat of a meal I've now had too many nights in a row (see last post and the post before that).  Ed is snoozing again, but I can't be surprised. He spent time on building closet shelves in the Lemon Room (where my little one and her BF will be staying) and he went up to his place of business and, as if that weren't enough -- he picked (the last?) tomatoes again. Here they are -- being wheeled in in the dark of the late evening.






That's more than he's done in the last ten days put together.





Tomorrow, after work, we have the wedding rehearsal. I've never been to a wedding rehearsal. Let the weekend festivities begin!