JOE AND RHILEY

Joe and Rhiley were married in a tiny white church on the evening of the longest day of the year.

What is there to say about a wedding?  It's only one day out of many.  It will seem important until the days fan out into years and glancing backward makes you realize that it was only a jumping-off point.  Really, a wedding is almost nothing.

Rhiley sat on a wooden pew in the late afternoon, pressed and dressed in her wedding finery, waiting for her groom, no longer worried about flowers or whether the best man would lose the rings.  "I'm just so ready to see him," she said.   She told me months ago how unnecessary all the wedding fuss and details seemed, how much more she preferred to work on her marriage than on all this pomp and grandeur.  The grandeur was had and duly appreciated, but she knew that the life she was about to begin was the most grand part of all.

A candle refused to light and the eventual success prompted a round of applause; the wedding party charged down a hill toward the bride and groom amid a chorus of battle cries; impromptu singing was the rule rather than the exception.  There was so much good food to be had that everyone's eyes were bigger than their stomachs.  I chatted with the photographer late in the night and found out that she had shot over five hundred weddings.  "This one easily ranks in the top five," she told me.  "I really mean that."

I don't know if I've ever had as much fun at a wedding as I did the day that Joe and Rhiley became husband and wife.  Every bit of their celebration was a feast for the eyes and a credit to the many hands that had prepared it out of love for the bride and groom.  And at the end of the day, none of it mattered as much as this: that they were finally married.  The next part of the story will be even better.