Journal: News & Comment

Full circle

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Ten years ago today, it was a cloudy Saturday morning in Burnaby, B.C., and it looked like it might rain. But as the morning went on, the clouds burned away, and before lunchtime my wife and I were married in the sunshine, under a tree on the lawn of the Hart House. We walked a few steps to the reeds at the shore of Deer Lake, where our photographer took a picture of me carrying her among the stalks.

We hadn't written our own vows, and I don't remember exactly what we said, because my head was swimming all morning with what we meant: that we would be together the rest of our days. On our tenth anniversary, today, I know even better that we will. Last night, my wife and I had dinner, then drove to Deer Lake again and stood near those reeds as the sun set and the full moon rose. We thought back seven years earlier than our wedding, to when we had first met, both working as park naturalists—and to the day that summer in 1988 when we'd accidentally flipped our canoe in this same lake. Last night, the air was thick with insects, but they didn't bother us much, and they provided quite a feast for the spiders, bats, and frogs we could see and hear by the water.

My friend Tara was one of my attendants in 1995, and today my wife, our two daughters, and I spent the afternoon at the rehearsal for Tara's wedding, which is tomorrow, exactly ten years of Saturdays after ours.

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