HAINES -- My daughter wanted to get married on a boat. It was a sure way to guarantee that in this small town only family and close friends would attend. It was either that or, as her four siblings were lobbying for, a destination wedding someplace warm in January.
This being Haines, and since JJ grew up here and worked at our lumberyard through school before becoming a Juneau teacher, we put an ad in the paper inviting everyone to the potluck at the cannery beach afterward.
It was kind of funny when the wedding party, in all our dress-up clothes, greeted the Alaska-geared tourists coming off the boat from Skagway. Wedding guests carried bottles of prosecco for the toast, a couple of vases of flowers, cups and napkins, smoked salmon and crackers. My friend Teresa even had a bag with white fabric to drape over the fire extinguisher and a string of colorful prayer flags to dress up the area in the bow where the ceremony would take place in the hour or so before the ferry motored back across Lynn Canal.
Later, my husband even admitted the boat worked out well. He had been a doubter. "If it's rough, everyone will be puking," he said as we got ready for bed the night before.
"Then we will go to Plan B," I said. Luckily, he fell asleep before asking me what that was, since I didn't exactly know.
So many unknowns
We have celebrated three other daughters' weddings in Haines -- one was even in January -- and experience has taught me that a good celebration has less to do with checklists and everything to do with love and the people gathered 'round.
Still, I hoped there would be enough food, and woke up my husband and asked if he thought we had fortified the potluck with plenty of extra salads and had marinated enough flank steak for the groom's family, who are from St. Louis and don't like fish.
"No one will starve," my husband said.
I could have gone home happy after the ceremony on the boat. It was sweet, sincere and just what the couple wanted, which is such a relief for the mother of the bride. Grandma Joanne, my daughter's namesake, declared that the mountains surrounding the blue-green water of the fjord were grander than a cathedral.
I cried when they promised to love and cherish each other forever. What mother doesn't? Marriage is a huge thing. There are so many unknowns. Life as I know it began when I was married 33 years ago and we drove to Alaska on our honeymoon.
I wish for them the kind of partnership my husband and I have had. I can't tell JJ and Bryan how we did it, though. All I know for certain is that it has been my great good luck that as we grew up together, all our changes -- or most of them, anyway -- made us closer. That is something you can't predict or always control.
And yet, when I looked around at the gathering on the boat, I saw friends and family who had been together for decades -- since we were all kids really. Not all them married, but as either friends or couples, they have remained close.
At my birthday party this year, an old friend, who had taught the bride in elementary school before taking a college job down south and then retiring and returning to Haines, said all the long-term relationships make the town home for her.
"I have known most of these women since we were in our 20s. I love that," Ellen said. She thinks there's a special bond between people who have been friends since before putting on that responsible adult "mask." You never forget the clan of your youth.
Shared history
Haines is like a family in that way, too -- a sometimes dysfunctional one, but so many of us go back so far now that we have fought and made up more than once, and there is a respectfulness that comes with our shared history.
Maybe that's why I had so much fun dancing to Lunchmeat and the Pimentos, who have (almost) all been swinging together since they -- and we -- were about the bride and groom's age. I know the tunes they play.
I also believe in the lucky charm of a saying, "Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue."
Why am I only remembering that now, two weeks after the wedding? Did I remind my daughter? Actually, I think we had it covered without even trying.
Grandma Joanne is certainly "something" especially when she was dancing with my dad at the wedding, and they are both old (80s). That counts. The bride and groom did borrow Tim and Sue's car, and Tim drove them in it from the dock to the party with a "Just Married" sign on the back and cans jangling behind.
Donna tucked blue flowers in the bouquet she made (and the sky was blue, too), and our favorite old band even had a new player -- a fellow from Germany who traveled all the way to Alaska with his tuba to join them. Well, if that's not good luck at a wedding, what is?
Haines author Heather Lende's third book, "Find the Good," was published earlier this year (and excerpted in We Alaskans). Keep up with Lende on her blog and her Facebook page.