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Five Weddings and Six Funerals

Time Like an Ever-Rolling Stream

by Edie Clark

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This spring and summer, it seems, has been a succession of weddings and funerals. I want the weddings to win but the funerals keep coming. One week in May I went to three funerals in six days, all at a distance so, just in terms of the driving, I felt spent at the end. A wedding that took place the weekend before was all there was for balance. This weekend was a wedding on Saturday and a funeral on Sunday. As if scripted by the universe, Saturday was a gorgeous sunny hot day, the likes of which we have not really seen yet this summer, and Sunday was cold and rainy, the likes of which now seem commonplace to us in the Northeast.

The wedding was for the daughter of a friend of mine, Judy, who died of cancer ten years ago. Judy and Tom had built their own house on a big piece of land in the interesting little town of Royalston, Massachusetts. That was back in the seventies and after, Tom became a timber framer, raising frames near and far, and, on that land there, he has since put up several more cottages so that the place looks like an early settlement. Quaint shingled cottages are hidden here and there, all like something out of Chaucer, giving the feeling of a village. They also raised their two children here, Lydia and Taj, Taj's name being a contraction of "Tom and Judy." Lydia, for whose wedding we were gathering, has become a sculptor, of the modern persuasion, so, as we parked in the field and wandered toward the house where tents were set up for the wedding, we stopped in the field to admire some of her work -- tall ceramic towers, layered, stacked like pancakes as they rise up from the ground, some teetering and bending, some straight as steel beams. Rare sunlight and shadows from the trees all around played on the sides of these creations as we admired them.

In the middle of the field, between two fruit trees, Tom had constructed a wedding arch out of new timbers and woven the carved rafters with white silk. He and the groom-to-be had also constructed an outdoor oven, a "forno," as Tom calls it. Tom is of Italian descent and his artful cooking speaks strongly of that heritage, mixed with the counterculture cuisine so familiar in these parts. For emphasis and perhaps humor, he built a little mock temple around the furnace and finished it off with Roman pillars and other Italian decorations. I don't know about Italy but I think I can safely say there is no more beautiful forno in all of New England. The fire was stoked when we all arrived, bread sticks were emerging, later there would be pizza. Inside the house, Tom was putting the finishing touches on the wedding cake he had made for Lydia and Josh. Tom's new wife, Deb, also worked and helped make the wedding what it was. When we all arrived, Tom and Deb and Josh and Lydia were all still in their t-shirts and shorts, getting everything ready. Like everything else in their world, it was a homemade wedding. In time, they went inside and dressed for the ceremony, Tom and Josh in jackets and ties, Deb in a long azure dress and Lydia in a white wedding dress she had ordered online from China. It was beautiful. On cyber, she had supplied them with 35 different measurements and the result fit her like a glove. Gorgeous embroidery of birds and flowers wandered down the front from neck to hem. Soon, they emerged, thus dressed, from the handbuilt house and walked up the path to the arch, music supplied by friends. The sun shone, everyone present shone. When asked, we all cried out our support for the new couple.