Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Blame Iton Paris
- Copyright Notice
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Book One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Book Two
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
“I didn’t think we would be clearing trees for the wedding!”
David came down on the weekend with a five-foot chain saw to attack the main trunks and was joined by Anna’s fiancé Ken, who had to be rethinking his decision to join the family at that point. Stefan and Larry flew in a few days before the wedding and started log-splitting contests to get those three-foot-wide trunks into disposable morsels. “May I never again,” Stefan said grimly, hoisting a mallet, “have to try to split green red oak.”
We stacked all the wood to burn throughout several winters, a criminal waste: the red oak was so solid and beautiful from one end of those hundred-foot-plus trees to the other that anyone who had ever made furniture would have killed us. We went to bed aching every night, got up at six in the morning, and cleared. We usually broke around 5:00 P.M. from sheer exhaustion, showered off filth, and went to run wedding errands for the next few hours. “We’ve got to get this done at least three days before the wedding, so the branch cuts on my arms and face have time to heal,” I mentioned. “Also so I can throw the flowers over my shoulder. Right now my arm hurts too much to bend it that far back.”
“We should have eloped,” Sébastien said.
“You were the one who wanted a white dress and family!” At the very beginning of our wedding plans, I had argued for a simple blue sheath dress and a tiny ceremony in New Zealand. Sébastien, however, had insisted on a fancy white gown and family. I tried to throw this fact up at him as often as I could.
“I was still getting to know your family at the time.” But he laughed when he said it. This guy was just too special.
“How did you end up with me?” I asked out loud, baffled.
“Because that night you said you would marry me, I felt as if my whole world had exploded wide open and this new, beautiful horizon stretched all around me,” he said and turned his chain saw back on. The roar cut off conversation, and the keen-sweet, sunny smell of fresh-cut green wood filled the air.
I remembered that evening. It was after a skating/scootering trip, the night before I left to get my visa for France. I had been clutching my teddy bear, sick with nerves, still harboring a secret fear of marriage reducing my own horizons to family vacations in Disneyland—or, even worse, EuroDisney—and he was thinking something that beautiful. People ask me all the time why someone like Sébastien ended up with me. It’s not very complimentary, but I understand where they’re coming from. And all I can say is, I honest to God do not know.