In a feat of superhuman strength, Matt and I made it from
St. Croix to NYC to Manassas, VA in an eighteen hour turnaround to go to a
tasting and expo at our wedding venue. Given the uncertain nature of our
schedules, there’s no guaranteeing we will have another opportunity to go visit
again before we are backhanding each other with frosting and squeezing each
other’s hands through slurred, unprompted toasts. It was imperative we get to
Virginia and start gathering intel for Operation: Wedding.
You can pinterest your wedding all day
long and in the heat of the moment, some decisions will still come as a
surprise. The strongest example for me?
Wedding Pie.
It is impossible to oversell my love of pie. Oh, what kind,
you ask? What is this, amateur hour? ALL OF IT. I love PIE. The miracle of
sweet, tangy key limes juiced to perfection, floating delicately above
compressed graham cracker crumbs all whilst kissing a small, puffy cloud of
creamy, sugary heaven? Give it. Rich molasses enveloping hearty pecans so
delicious nobody cares how they’re pronounced, bursting against the confines of
buttery, flaky golden crust? Bring it. Schnazzberry and rhubarb? I’ll gleefully
devour seconds whilst wearing your silly purple top hat, Mr. Wonka. Pie isn’t
afraid to transcend borders and stake out new territory, either. Chicken pot
pie. Shepherd’s pie. PIZZA pie. Everyone loves pizza. Chicken pot cobbler?
Pizza cake? I’d gag but my head already exploded trying to conceive of such
vulgarity. I think you get it.
I have never been one
of those girls who planned her wedding. The only thing I nailed down from an
early age was that I would have wedding pie instead of cake. It has been
literally the only detail I cared to plan. Tiers of wedding pies with unlimited
choice for my guests! Pies on pies on pies! Pies in a house with a mouse, on a
boat with a goat with nary a cake to be seen!
I’m just not a huge cake fan. When people pass it out at
birthday parties, I take the smallest piece possible out of obligation. It’s all
just…sugary bread with no flavor jazzed up with a chance to eat some annoying
cartoon character’s face (face it, gleefully chewing Dora’s face so she can’t
ask you another insipid question is MOST gratifying. I’ll tell you which way to
go: MY STOMACH). Celebratory cake almost never blows my mind (Two exceptions:
My Nannie’s lemon pound cake and Cynthia Montana’s chocolate mint cake.
Nannie’s lemon pound cake was so good, one year my grandma tried to replicate
it. Cheers of “NANNIE CAKE!” quickly subsided into sputtering crumbs and shrieks
of disdain. The masses knew an impostor when it crossed their lips). Bottom
line: the best cake is just…cake. The worst pie still pile-drives it into the
ground for me.
We’re at the expo trying different bakeries samples and my
stepmother is graciously asking every baffled vendor if wedding pie is a
possibility. The best suggestion? “We could maybe make a cake that was like a
pie!” I just…fail to see how that’s not a cake. Or how a bakery could be so
confused about the concept of pie.
Here’s my Marie Antionette moment: everybody else likes cake but me…so let them
eat cake. Cake is classy. Somehow, it became the desert of celebration and pie
became the desert of holidays. I can respect that, sort of an Apple vs PC
situation. Some jagaloons even look
forward to cake at a wedding. It’s one of the comforts in this pinterest-crazy,
themed wedding world we live in. Think about the INSANITY we’re subjecting
people to at weddings now. “I wasn’t
sure where I was after that slam-poetry reading of Mumford lyrics at the
ceremony… or after sitting on a bale of hay for an hour while they passed out
mason jars filled with homemade pickle juice, whiskey and condescension at
cocktail hour but…this is definitely a wedding! There’s CAKE!” I can’t ask my
closest friends and family to vow to support our marriage without giving them a
piece of cake or it’s doesn’t feel official.
I may be a bride who loves pie but this isn’t “my day”. It’s about family.
I do not have the luxury of believing our family in this
world comprises only those given to us by birth. I shook that notion like so
much dust from my feet years ago. It’s at weddings and funerals that we see the bond like so many silk threads connecting us inseparably and
inexplicably. The deceptive plateaus of time between extremes can allow us to
delude ourselves that the connection has been worn away by distance and neglect
but it’s never true. We thread and weave new members into our family with every
passing year and their joys and trials send ripples of energy through every
strand. We are all affected by even the tangential connections. Its touch lets
us know we’ve transcended into family; that our lives are no longer merely
anecdotal to one another but experienced together. Matthew understands the
finality and implications of becoming my family. We are now openly inviting
people to join or reaffirm that connection.
Every guest who RSVP’s attending will be entering into that
covenant with us. I hold that covenant close to my heart, closer than…dare I
say it…pie. Our guests vow to shine the
light that guides us home to each other when we veer off course, to cover our
ears from the siren calls of the world that want to watch us dash apart against
the rocks. So many marriages are falling apart around us these days. I don’t
think it’s harder to be married. I think somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves
that marriage meant one person should be our “everything”, “the one”, “MY WORLD”
instead of asking someone to be our PERSON: our best partner amongst a wonderful,
ever-expanding network of people. Two threads in a web intertwined for
strength, knowing that without the whole web they’ll be blown about in the
wind.
If you’re at our wedding, you’re a part of us. You’re
connected to us forever. Your highs and lows are ours and vice versa. We will
feel them rippling towards us, heedless of the confines of time and space,
because we are family.
That’s a lot to ask of anyone. The least I owe you is a
piece of stupid cake.
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