“I don’t mean to be critical, but have you noticed that every time we go to your parents’ they have a backbreaking project for me? Septic tank, fountain . . .”

We left the next morning and got halfway up my parents’ driveway. We couldn’t go farther. Trees blocked the rest of the way. I got out of the car and stared in hysterical hilarity. I think both of us, up to that moment, had been envisioning these trees as, well, somewhat smaller. The two red oaks that had bordered my parents’ drive now lay sprawled from one end of the two-acre front yard to the other. With the trees on their sides, some of the bigger branches slanted twenty feet or more into the air. The oaks had grown for over a hundred years in Southern semitropics before being cut, and the enormous spread of their branches covered pretty much everything.

“We didn’t want any of your guests to be hurt on our property,” my dad explained, coming out to meet us as we picked our way through the mess.

“So I’ve heard.” I ran my hand over the stump of one of the trees, three feet in diameter and solid, beautiful red oak from one end to the other. “Tell me again how much that tree guy charged you to cut down these rotten trees and save your guests? I’d love to have his address.”

By my side, Sébastien was alternating between laughter and slow shakes of his head. “And you thought my mom’s salad test was tough,” he said. “I’ve drunk wine from Alabama, competed with shotguns, dug up a septic tank, and now I have a football field full of trees to clear in less than a week. Does your family know that in traditional fairy tales the suitor gets to stop after three tests?”

“Oh, you’re not a suitor anymore,” my father said. “You’re family! We’re just treating you like one of the kids.”

“Oh,” Sébastien said, speechless with pleasure at being so embraced into the bosom of the family.

We put on our oldest clothes and set to, my father and Sébastien on chain saws cutting up the branches, my sister Anna and I hauling them away. If there’s a month you don’t want to clear trees in Georgia, it’s July. The first day, Sébastien peeled down to the scantiest clothes possible and even so could not believe this experience. “Laura, even my underwear is soaking wet,” he said.

“Yeah.” I didn’t have much energy for more syllables, and sweat-soaked clothes weren’t the same news flash to me.

“I can’t believe you complained about Paris weather.”

“I told you we didn’t want to get married in July! May, I said. But no, you said Justine wouldn’t be out of school until the end of June and we had to wait for that.”