Josh had a clean shaven face and his shoulder length hair pulled back into a gel-slicked pony tail.
Katie had to shoo the cat off the tables because he was hopping from table to table eating (or at least licking?) the cheese platters.
Everyone looks so young in the pictures, especially me and Josh. I was 9 years older than Timothy is now. Elisabeth was barely 18.
I think of that day often, and the night before playing 3-man in the Boxborough Host Hotel when the police had to come because a neighbor complained that we were rolling the dice too loud. Groomsman Tim answered the door because, well, I was in no condition.
Not-yet-Uncle Jeff, in his dress clothes, shoveled ice from the hotel container into a kiddie pool in the back of my mom's truck and drove it back to Cobleigh Rd, forever sealing his place in my heart. Upon arriving home he placed the pool next to my sister's awesome sign: "The Brew Lagoon" and started unpacking the beer.
My mom made the cake ahead and time and Aunt Mary Beth arrived a day early to decorate it. Then they decorated the arch with lilacs donated from 2 states worth of friends and family.
I sat with my sisters and my friend Kerrie on the front steps and made bouquets from loose flowers purchased at Idylwilde. We purchased boutonnieres but I forgot about them and found them in the fridge the next day.
My grandmother loaned me her pearl necklace and earrings for my "something borrowed." Last April, before she died, they became no longer borrowed.
My grandfather had died 4 years earlier. I tied his military tag to my blue garter, which later became the something borrowed/blue for my sisters.
The JP was very old and we weren't sure he'd make it through the ceremony.
Mandy sang an original song during the ceremony that I still hum to myself when I think of the day.
After we said "I do", the guests on the end seats released helium balloons with our wedding announcements tied to them. The balloons promptly flew into the trees and got stuck for several years.
My mom got a dance floor on loan from the hotel and we ruined the grass in front of the porch, where the tape player and speakers were turned out to face it. I had invited my friend Sam only the day before and he happened to bring some mix tapes.
The kid down the street video taped the day and then edited it after school in the AV room at the high school.
The day was perfect.
We didn't know what we were in for then. We didn't know we'd become experts at cleaning puke off any given surface at 2am. We didn't know we'd have screaming matches and throw things at each other across the house. We didn't know we'd agree that 7:30pm is the perfect bedtime until age 12, that our kids really don't contribute enough to get an allowance, or that maintaining a clean car is simply not worth it.
We didn't know we'd raise a child with autism, and that merely saying the phrase "Morgan has autism" would take years of practice before we could even do it out loud. We didn't know that after 2 kids and in the middle of trying for a 3rd, I'd lose my job just as a daytime gambling habit had max'd out our many credit cards. We didn't know we'd both gain and lose so much weight over and over.
We didn't know that we would sit on the couch together and watch a baby fall asleep nursing. We didn't know that we would cry at preschool graduations and school concerts. We didn't know that we'd learn to cherish sleeping in until 8am, uninterrupted by little fingers poking us in the eyes, because we didn't know those days would be so rare.
We thought we knew we'd love each other forever, but we didn't really. I think it was enough that we knew we wanted to.
We didn't know any of those things. We were young and stupid and happy, and now we're old and stupid and happy.
And still now, we don't know much more. We know the past, but we have no idea what will happen next or how we will deal with it.
Today we know the one exact thing that we knew 15 years ago - that whatever to come, whatever to happen, whatever life brings - we face it together.
And that we love each other today.
And that that's enough.
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