Pastures of Plenty

Around this time last year, I was in Seattle for the funeral of a very dear friend. Tomorrow, I am going back to Seattle to be the Maid of Honor in the wedding of a very dear friend.

It seems premature, at twenty-four years of age, to be attending either of these affairs.

Yet nothing can be done about the passing of a friend in death -- it is a gloomy detail of life. For reasons that seem related, one feels the same about a marriage -- compared to a funeral, it has about it the same fact/fate/fatality. Until death do us part: Marriage is a chain to the death.

For this particular bride, who will tie the knot on Saturday, it is printed in the stars that she is to be chained to her groom for life, before death. They have a wonderful linkage, those two. To celebrate this union, they are throwing the most low-key, unconventional of ceremonies, where we will all be Vegan, but far from straight edge.

I appreciate this more than the bride knows and look forward to sharing a tent with old friends, under the stars, outside a house that lies so far east in Washington state, that one could practically call it Idaho.

And twenty-four is not so young; my grandmother was married at this age and so was yours. Moreover, if I were not living in New York, and chose instead a smaller town, I would probably be married by now and super-pregnant.