Wedding accomplished!

Friday evening some tall handsome young men came to me and in very serious tones asked formal permission to set off some fireworks in our lower meadow. "All right," I said gravely, "but you have to remember one thing: all our neighbors own shotguns."

At any rate the fireworks went off with a bang with no mishaps or complaints. My son and my new son-in-law's two brothers put on a pretty spectacular show for about 20 young people gathered on the night before my daughter's wedding; meanwhile, the bridesmaids moved furniture and rolled up rugs in the garage apartment to make a pretty passable dance floor, where they gave the assembly swing-dance lessons. All I had to do was stay out of the way.

The wedding and the reception were entirely free of fireworks, although we had plenty of laughter and joy. At the wedding I had a whole row of my daughter's music-major friends sitting behind me, so when we all stood up to sing "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name," it felt like heaven.

One small glitch arose Saturday morning, when my husband woke up feeling quite sick. He had spent a good part of the week baking many beautiful loaves of braided challah bread to serve at the reception, but then he was too sick to take the racks of bread to the reception hall. So I set off with a van full of bread and a bridesmaid, and I left my son behind with exactly one task: "Make sure your father gets to the church on time" (which was pretty important since he, along with the groom's uncle, was officiating at the service!). I delivered the bread to the hall and my son delivered the pastor to the church, and in the end everyone ended up in the right place.

But where are the bride and groom? The drove two hours last night to stay near the airport, and today they fly out to an undisclosed location, which will be revealed on the groom's Facebook page sometime today. If the past week's events are any indication of their future, I suspect they'll be sharing a great deal of laughter and joy for a long time to come.

And dancing, of course. And maybe even some fireworks.