So, about that wedding...
I guess I should actually write something about this.


Yes, James and I got married a couple of Saturdays ago. It was a relatively low-key affair - only immediate family present, held on my family's farm, short and simple. At some later date there will be celebratory parties in two states for the many people who might want to celebrate with us or just have an excuse for a party, but that'll happen... somebraintime. Yeah, that.

So, more details. I have Opinions about weddings. They were not changed any by my first one almost nine years ago. For instance:

• I believe a wedding should be shorter than everybody's bladder capacity. In this case, smallest bladder belongs to me, and as bride I figure I hold veto over anything that was going to possibly be long-winded. Nothing cuts a speech short like a yellow trickle pooling around the bottom of a wedding dress and a slightly pervasive sour smell drifting slowly around the room.
  
• I also very much appreciate simple. There's grandiose and theatrical, and there's what's real. For me, the most magical and memorable moments have been exquisitely simple. I organise big events. I don't need to have them. It seems far more effective to me to create an event that will have all the right things happen by its own nature instead of having a thousand and one little things that someone needs to stay on top of to make sure they happen properly. Cos who's going to have to do it? Muggins, that's who. I wouldn't trust it to someone else. And nobody needs the appearance of Bridezilla. Basically, too many details = unnecessary stress and fuss. I hate fuss.
  
• Intelligence and empathy are useful qualities to design an event around. Any kind of event. But especially one like this. How are people going to feel, and will they be able to follow what's going on and feel part of it? And are the two most-likely-to-be-stunned-and-distracted people going to be able to hold their part?
  
• The queen-for-a-day thing. No. Absolutely no. There are two of us in this, there have been and there always will be. I think the whole everyone celebrate the bride extravaganza thing is humiliating and stupid, not to mention completely unnecessary, and alienating to the groom who has just as much at stake here. It's not the most important day of my life. And marriage is made of much more than a procession where everyone gives you attention. If I want a couple of hundred people all with their attention focused solely on me, I can go do a show performance and have them eating out of my hand. I don't need it on my wedding day.
  
• It's not the most important day of your life. It's just the day you did the paperwork that let the government officially know what was going on. For me, my actual anniversary is October 3rd, which is when James and I finally got it together and made our agreements and accepted permanence. That was more than a year before the government-approved wedding. Sticking to the belief that this is not the most important day of your life makes the organisation, and expectations, a lot easier to manage.

James also has Opinions about weddings. As best I can tell, they are:

• We'll be married at the end of it
  
• It's not going to change anything
  
• I want to look good.

So this all worked fairly well together. I took on the bulk of the organising, on the theory that if I was in charge then both mothers-in-law could complain together about the way I'd done it instead of getting irritated by the way the other had done it. It also meant I got things to happen in a way that was a minimum of fuss - my most important criteria, in this case. I have more limitations than usual at the moment. And it meant I could keep things as low cost as possible, and only have things that we *wanted* to pay for.

We held the wedding on my family's farm. It's a special place in a lot of ways. I don't think anyone's ever visited that wasn't struck by a sense of beauty. If you want a place where you can believe magic is real, this is it. The farm sits inside forest. The northeast corner is karri forest, we're about as far east as the karri grows. And tucked into those tall, tall shining trees is a tall granite boulder, open to the sky. That's where we held the ceremony. On the top.

In deference to my currently-limited ability to scramble over rocks, and the fact that James' family hadn't been there before and we didn't know if they could scramble up, my brother Chris built a short set of steps using stuff we had lying around the farm shed, and James and Chris put them up against the trickiest last metre or so of rockface on the morning of the wedding.

The celebrant was a lady named Kate Thomas. Mum had heard she was good from other people in the town, and I found her from a different direction when I went websurfing for celebrants in the area. Turns out she lives on a farm maybe only fifteen minutes away. Quite close. So close, in fact, that her phone number is only one digit different from ours. She was nice, seemed to cope with it all just fine.

The people who came: just our families. Both of us have all our extended family overseas. So "family" means James' mum and dad, his sister and brother-in-law, my mother, my brother and my foster-brother. There's really no-one else that could have been expected to show, in family terms.

Style of ceremony was simple. James is atheist, I'm some kind of undefined pagan, and all our (living) parents have a strong Christian background which they tend to ignore unless challenged on it. So we took out any quasi-religious aspects. I also stripped out any unnecessary talking and scene setting. We had an advantage. This ceremony wasn't playing to a crowd. After all, we couldn't fit a crowd on top of the Rock. So everyone there knew the bride and groom, knew our history (or as much as we'd ever told them of it), knew exactly what was going on. In a lot of weddings there's a bit of storytelling and setting the scene. We didn't need that. So, with apologies to Kate, I took her lovely suggested draft script and stripped out of it anything that wasn't relevant to that precise moment of here-and-now. We didn't refer to absent friends and family, because, well, once started, where would you stop? We had hundreds and maybe thousands of people who weren't there. We didn't refer to the child I'm carrying, because they wouldn't know or care if they were talked about or not. We just stuck to what was, here and now. No expectations of the future, no historical ties. Just the most real of all the moments.

Our vows were haiku. Well, we said the government-approved bits too, as much as they were, and put up with the monitum that the celebrant had to read. But then we exchanged our own vows. Again, short, simple, as real and relevant as possible. Truthful. And as each of us did so, we took the free end of the ribbon tied around our own wrist and tied it around the wrist of the other. His left, my right, so that both of us had a dominant or semi-dominant hand free. This was all supposed to happen without prompting, on the basis that we'd just had a long stretch of "monkey say, monkey do" and there should be some quietness again. And it was only one thing we had to remember. Unfortunately, James had lost track of where the unprompted bit went, so I had to grin and remind him. Oops. But then we were tied together, with his glowing sunny orange and my shimmering bronze-turquoise.

No exchange of rings. We have rings, very plain and titanium, flat profile, no engravings or design. We got them in early December, and have worn them since we got them. They're a signal to others more than to ourselves, and we both felt taking them out of the ceremony was a good idea. James, because then they didn't have all that symbolic weight attached to them, and if we lost them or scratched them it really wasn't a big deal. (He knows my commitment phobia well, and seems happy enough to take small steps :-). Me, I was more concerned about the fact that we'd be on top of this big rock, with lots of crevices and deep mounds of leaf litter and thorny bushes at the bottom, and all I could imagine was drop-tinkle-bounce-bounce-whoops... the odds would be good of never seeing a ring again. So we already had the rings on before we got there. Can't lose them that way. Plus, the ceremony was already full of all these exchanges - the confirmations that we both knew what we were doing, the two sets of vows, the ribbons. We didn't need any more. If anyone hadn't got the picture by that point, they would have deserved a thumping.

And then it was over, bar the kiss.

I have always gone weak with James' kisses. -smile-
It was nice to see him be half-weak with one too. -grin-.

So, celebrating briefly, a few hugs, and then settling in to wait for the helicopter.

Yes, helicopter.

We didn't have an official photographer or anything like that - people with cameras just took photos as they felt like it. And Mum decided to be extravagant, and ask a helicopter to fly over to take some pictures from above. Not the cheapest whim she's ever had, but fun. Apart from the organisation side of it, where we asked them to fly over at quarter to twelve, and they took that as "leave the heliport at quarter to twelve". So we waited in the sun for a while. But it was all good, in the end. There will be an official collection of photos at some point, when we get everything together from everyone's cameras. But not yet.

Once that was all done, it was off to lunch. A relatively informal affair, with some fish on the barbeque and some roast vegetables and salad vegetables on the table to go with it. Cake, too - two cakes. James' and my choice of cheesecake, and a beautiful traditional construction-thickness-icing wedding-type fruit cake made as a gift by one of our old neighbours. And then a quiet-ish afternoon with cups of tea, conversation, a walk around the farm to show our visitors some of the highlights. We finished late that afternoon with a quick trip to one of the local beaches, a peaceful and pretty place that's always nice to walk or swim at. And it was over. James and I retired that evening to the "wedding chateau" - in fact, a borrowed tent set up on the balcony of the shed. With an air mattress: wedding/Christmas present and concession to James' reluctance to enjoy sleeping on wooden floors -grin-. We fell asleep tangled as usual, surrounded by the song of frogs and stars and the scent of the orchards.