More than I could have hoped

Well. You might not believe me when I say this, but I've missed you all an awful lot. I can do without American coffee, or a climate that does not yield artichokes and chestnuts and backyard clementine trees and white truffles all November long, but you people, you I cannot. The past four weeks have been the most perfect, happy, wonderful ones of my entire life, but still, I absolutely could not wait to get back here and tell you about every single little thing.

For starters, we got married. I can't even really believe I'm old enough to have gotten married, or to be called even jokingly Mrs. Hay, but according to Maine state law, I am. (Then again, Maine state law also required us to read a pamphlet called Drugs and Alcohol Can Hurt Your Baby! before we could get our marriage license at town hall, which was also jumping the gun a little bit I thought, so who knows.) At any rate, we did it, and it was far and away the best thing I have ever done in my whole life.

It all happened in this barn, at noon on November 7th, while Alex stood at the back doors and my dad propped me up and a hundred camera lenses walked us down.

If you look closely you can see the tire swing where the flower girls played after the ceremony was done, and the field we all walked through to get to the reception in a tent on the water down the street. There was a violinist and a violist and a fiddler and one hundred and seventy-seven of our closest family and friends, including my 91-year-old grandmother who flew to Maine for the first time in three years just for the occasion. There were toasts, jokes about Alex's first girlfriend (a certain Snoozy Susie pillow), the time I asked my father if he Even Had a Brain, and from the best man, something charming and sly about unheated barns and November and very cold feet.

We drank cider martinis with Cold River Vodka alongside a New England cheese and homemade pickle bar, and the waitstaff walked around with plates of Vermont lamb chops and Maine crab cakes and beet and squash soup shooters and five types of deviled eggs. Then we sat down to dinner, served family style, and my heart just about burst.


Just about everything was from Maine. Katy did everything we asked and much, much more. She made that all Maine grain pilaf, a salad of local lettuce and dried cranberries and goat cheese, and plates of Topsham chicken stuffed with Six River Farm spinach and Cape Cod haddock with spicy aioli served whole. She got the bread from Standard Baking and the salt was evaporated from Cape Cod bay by a friend. There was Peak Organic on tap, and the cupcakes, of course, were these, homemade. Everyone ate until the tables were bare, and then we got up to dance.


Unfortunately, I don't have all the pictures just yet (unless my sister has actually gotten them from the photographer already, and is hiding some particularly incriminating evidence), but I promise to show you that part too when they come. For now, just know that Alex got a chance to step in on the drums, I may or may not have done a repeat of the Worm in my wedding dress, and no one went home until the music stopped. Even then, a whole bunch of us went out to a bar on the river downtown, and although Alex didn't seem quite so sure, I thought we made a pretty mean husband-and-wife karaoke team.

By the time Sunday afternoon rolled around and the brunch was over and our cousins and friends and aunts and uncles had hopped on planes or driven home, I think we were the happiest, most exhausted people on the planet. We went over to my parents' house with a bag of Indian take out and drank mango lassis and opened presents and switched the laundry from the washer to the dryer until finally, sometime around 8:30, everyone collapsed, utterly contented, into bed.

It was more than I could have hoped for, even in my fingers-crossed wildest dreams, and if I could, I would relive it over and over and over again every single day. Of course, Paris wasn't bad, or Florence, or the little Umbrian town, Panicale, where we stayed tucked in between the vineyards and the olive trees, but those are a story for another day. For now, just know that I am exceptionally glad to be back at home as Mrs. Alexander Bradford Hay.

P.S. Many thanks to our photographer, my sister's Tufts classmate Elizabeth Herman, for the pictures above. We don't have very many yet, but as you might imagine, the ones we do bode very well for what's to come.