*
I took a deep breath and tried to calm the palpitations that were pounding through my veins. I was standing on the edge of a mountain, nothing but vast open space around me for miles. The height wasn’t helping me relax, and for the hundredth time I silently asked myself why on earth I had wanted to get married on a mountain?
Then I saw her, veiled and gowned in white, gracefully descending the stairs towards me…and the world was made anew.
Okay, let me back up a bit and start at the beginning.
My name is Josh, and I am…well, let’s just say I’m an average guy, reasonably good-looking and very solidly walking a middle path through life. Which is as much as to say I haven’t got a lot of money, but I am not hurting either, and I’m certainly no heartthrob but I ain’t ugly. I’m the kind of guy that likes to be in the middle of things, without being the guy out in front of everything.
Now that that is comfortably out of the way, let me present the real reason I wrote all this down, and the reason 90% of you are reading it: my wife.
Odd, how small a word that is: wife. And yet, it holds so much meaning…
She’s my lover.
My companion.
My homemaker and helpmate.
My everlasting.
My forever and ever, amen.
Not to belabor a dead cliche here, but she is also the kindest, warmest, sweetest, prettiest and funniest woman in the whole world to me. I’ve never known anyone like her, and to be honest I have no idea why she would want to share the world with me…but I sure ain’t complaining.
We met a couple years ago, courtesy of some mutual friends at a religious convention we both happened to be attending. She was engaged at the time, or at least was going to be, to some guy she had known for years…but from the moment I first saw her, well…let me just tell you about what happened.
I was travelling with a group of friends and family, and we had come from a couple states away to attend this convention. It was a weekend-long affair, and we had, of course, gotten a late start, so it was a couple hours into the meetings that we finally arrived at the event center. But that turned out to be the best thing that had happened to me up to that time, because the way the event was set up, after every couple hours they would have a short bit of live music, kinda like an intermission, while everybody got up and stretched their legs.
So right as we were coming in the back of the conference room, where it was kept kind of dark, the music was starting at the front, on a bright stage.
And there, standing alone in the brilliance of the floodlights, was Sara.
I didn’t know her; I had never seen her before, and if she hadn’t been there, at that moment, I probably never would have. But there she was, standing tall in a flowing black evening gown, a beautiful violin tucked under her chin. Her eyes were shining, and her bow was moving gracefully across the strings, and what I heard…the music that she coaxed from that violin…I have never heard anything so beautiful in all my life.
To be honest I had never really been into music that much: I’m more of a writer and artist than musician. Certainly never been too keen on the violin.
But that day, as those trembling chords wafted enticingly and poignantly across the room, I stood, transfixed, unmoving and unable to move. All around me the music swayed and danced, slowly, and on the stage she slowly swayed with it, her eyes now shut and utter peace upon her brow. I cannot tell you how long the piece lasted; but I stood there for a thousand years, like Beren when he first saw Luthien, and I knew.
I knew I had laid eyes upon the one, the only one.
And then, as the music came to an end and the spell was broken, my fledgling hope was dashed upon the rocks. No sooner had the crowd begun to applaud than a tall handsome guy sprang up onto the stage and caught her in his arms, laughing and swinging her around in a circle. I can still hear the silver tinkle of her laughter, surprised and delighted, and see the radiant smile on her face…and then all at once he was down on one knee before her, she had clapped both hands to her mouth, and the crowd was going wild as he presented her with a ring.
You ever had that experience where you are dreaming something wonderful, something that you want with all your heart, is just about to happen and you cannot possibly wait one more second…and then you wake up? And no matter how hard you try you just can’t get back to sleep? Well, that’s what happened to me. I felt strangely hollow, like a part of me I didn’t even know existed had suddenly been taken away from me.
The remainder of that weekend was, well, a bit strange. I met her and was introduced, we shared some laughs and stories, and I found out she actually lived in the same town that I did. Ironic, no? Travelling all that way to find what was at home the whole time. I found out that I loved the violin, and she was keenly interested in my art, and after the convention was over we kept in touch, more or less, simply as friends.
The rest of the story is actually quite complicated and rather boring to be honest; it wound up not working out for them, he moved to another state and she stayed, we got a bit closer and became better friends, yadda yadda yadda. She went through some hard times, I went through some hard times, we helped each other out, and for about a year I just never could find the right time to tell her how I felt.
Then my Mom fell sick and passed on rather suddenly. And without dwelling too much on the pain of that time, let me just say that in a moment of desperate loneliness I blurted it all out to her…and ran.
I know, I know, dumb move, but no one had ever accused me of being smart anyway.
Turns out, she had actually grown very fond of me too, and didn’t think I was all that into her, which I guess tells you all you need to know about my communication skills. But the upshot was that we decided to give it a go and see what happened. She was a bit hesitant at first, having already broken up with a guy, but they hadn’t ever been really serious and I think she felt more certainty this time.
I knew immediately.
But it wasn’t till around six months ago that I thought she might be ready.
There’s a State Park in northern Georgia, a small mountain called Fort Mountain, that me and my family had always enjoyed going to, with lots of trails, cabins, a lake to swim in and some of the most breathtaking views in the South. Sara and I shared a love of the mountains, and frequently she and her folks had come down there too, sort of double-teaming our family outings. We also shared a love of figure skating, oddly enough; but where my appreciation for it was purely as a spectator, she had actually done a bit of skating herself, as an adolescent, and if I may say so was very good at it.
But I digress. Along one of the trails at Fort Mountain, there is a wooden deck that juts out over the edge of the ridge, giving you a magnificent panorama. But to make it even better, the way the trail winds up to it you can’t really see what is waiting for you until you actually get to the platform…and then it just spreads out before you, like a map hurled from the hand of a giant.
For a fleeting moment, it makes you feel like you are flying.
Call me a romantic fool, but I had long decided that whenever I got married, it would be here. And so, on a chilly day six months ago, I sprung the question.
I had a little help from her younger sister, who I swore to secrecy and took into my confidence, because I wanted to make this moment as special as I could. Our families were both there, about a dozen of us altogether, and her parents were going to Florida for a vacation the next week, so I figured this would be the best time for what I had in mind.
I managed to get her sister on ahead of the rest of us, on the pretense of going to get some good pictures of all of us coming up on the overlook, and then, by a combination of cunning and blind luck, got myself and Sara to the front of the party.
No matter how many times you go there, the view is always just as breathtaking; but this time, I scarcely even saw it. My heart was pounding like I’d just run a marathon, and I was literally breaking into a sweat despite the chill, that’s how nervous I was.
Sara didn’t suspect a thing. She moved down the last flight of stone steps to the platform, looking out at the view with the usual wide-eyed expression that it always causes, and I had managed it so that we were able to get to the railing where her sister was before the others had quite reached the deck itself.
I knelt, silently, looking up at Sara as she looked out over the valley. The wind blew her dark hair back away from her lovely face, raising a flush on her cheeks, and she closed her eyes and sighed, apparently never dreaming what I was about to do. Her sister was grinning from ear to ear, snapping away with the camera.
I actually had to swallow, twice, before I could make the words come out, and then, just as I was about to speak, we heard a gasp from our folks…who had just seen us. Sara turned, and her eyes went wide as she looked down at me, wide and filling suddenly with tears. She put her hand to her mouth, and every dang word of the pretty little speech I had planned went right out of my head.
So, I improvised.
“Will you marry me?”
And the next thing I knew, her arms were around my neck and she was sobbing in my ear.
“Yes! Yes, oh yes! Oh, Josh I love you! I love you!”
It was only the wind, of course, that made my eyes start running. I mean, it was chilly, right? And then I was on my feet fumbling with the ring and she was laughing and crying at the same time, and her sister’s grin was gonna split her face in two and our families were crowding around and hugs and kisses were flying. My Dad thumped me on the back, and I asked her’s formally if I could marry his daughter…I mean I would have, if he hadn’t grabbed me in the same kind of hug that her mom was giving her.