Do you remember September?

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it,
and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." - George Eliot​

Maybe September has always had a sacredness to it, between my childhood's sticky celebration of the Jewish holidays that practically tumble over each other from week to week in the fall, and the opening of the new academic year that still, now that I am adjunct faculty at Antioch University, rules my calendar. My psyche was, perhaps, already anticipating, when Darby and I kissed for the first time in September nine years ago, the deep journey of love and growth that has many times made me wonder at why we look upward to find sanctity when it is so often shining back at us, holy and pure, through the eyes of someone who loves us. No wonder Darby and I chose a date in September, six years after that kiss, and three years ago today, for our wedding. Darby, and I, and the kidlets - my stepdaughters who are two of my greatest teachers -  stood in our backyard under a crystal chandelier hung from a branch of the mulberry, our dear friend Jeff officiated, and a small group of family and friends gathered around to witness our vows.

​I'm not sure that I have always believed that I deserved a love like Darby's, but I know that all my life I have hoped that I would be one of the lucky ones to receive such a gift.

What's happening in the first photo below is this:

Right about 5 pm, three years ago today, it was my turn to repeat the officiant as he read, line by line, the vows that Darby and I had written. It was a Saturday, and I'd taken two days off of work at the record label, and put aside for a few days my work for graduate school, where I was also the editor of the program's literary and art journal. I wasn't thinking of any of that, of course.

I wasn't thinking about the cheese table, which friends had laden with flowers and fruit that afternoon. I wasn't thinking about the sitar, or the harmonium, or the friends who had walked us down the aisle from our bedroom to the tree with a sweet rendering of Buddy Holly's Everyday, or the caterer standing by with portobello mushrooms and lasagna, or the cake I'd made that was in the kitchen melting. I wasn't thinking about the malformed signature that I'd just affixed to our beautiful hand-drawn and hand-calligraphied ketubah. I wasn't, for the moment, concerned about family dynamics, or overhead airplanes.

I was just here, standing beside my loving stepdaughters, with my hair in some unexpected 'do that the stylist had chosen that morning and wearing a friend's borrowed shoes, with more people in our backyard than I thought possible, about to officially wed the love of my life who looked terribly dashing in his fine linen three-piece suit.

But an editor is an editor, I suppose. Just a moment before the photographer's shutter snapped, the officiant read a line that was ever-so-slightly not quite what we'd put on paper so many weeks before. Not consciously, I simply turned the phrase back around when I recited it to my almost-spouse. My mind was, I guess, trained to it. I'd been close-reading, proofreading, and editing for two years straight. The officiant looked back at his notes, laughed aloud about his error, and shared with everyone my editorial correction. The shift in attention, the jovial reaction of my almost-spouse, and the reference to my quotidian that felt so outside of the reverent moment caught me by complete surprise. I was so present, and this moment of laughter was authentically joyful. The shutter snapped. The photographer pinned the moment down forever. And we were married.

The best thing I never decided to do was fall in love with Darby. It happened of its own accord - if you know Darby, you can surely understand how. Who knew we'd be even better married?

Happy anniversary to us!