We gathered in Asheville, NC, to honor Katherine Wilson and Sean Mason as they celebrated their wedding day. We could not have been more privileged. I was given the greatest gift when asked to speak a few words on behalf of that moment in time, and Katherine has asked that I share them here.
And so I do.
For Katherine, on her wedding day.
December 8, 2012
If you know Katherine Wilson—if you love her—you know what joy is. It is the color, I’ve decided, of winter sun, 4 PM, Saturday afternoon—more pink than gold, generous and fulgent. It’s homemade strawberry jam, lemon-rosemary chicken, the salad that doesn’t need a dressing because it’s been sensationalized with just a little tiny bit of garlic salt. Joy is a side of Parmesan risotto, a hot tray of zucchini chips, a glass of honey wine, a long drive or a weekend in, an evening by the fire, an oar dipped into a river at dawn.
Joy radiates. It is contagious. And if you step even this close to Katherine Wilson, you’re already gone, done in. You’ve been joy-ified, and there will be no going back. As long as Katherine’s near, you’re smiling.
The same thing happens, by the way, in Carolyn’s presence. I’m guessing red-haired, black-haired, light-haired genetics.
Katherine’s joy is why we’re here today. Katherine’s joy and the most ridiculously lucky fact that there is someone in this world—just the right, rare someone—who wants Katherine to be happier than she already, innately is. Someone who makes Katherine happiest.
It might not have happened. Life doesn’t always yield, doors don’t always open, but into Katherine’s world stepped this man who has the kind of huge wide heart that knows what treasure is. A man who wanted to keep Katherine safe. A man who wanted to build her a home. A man who wanted to photograph her against the rising and the setting sun. A man who lets Katherine know how beautiful she is, and look how beautiful she is, in the face of love.
“I just like to sit and think about how lucky I am and about how much I love my life,” Katherine is known to write—on her blog, or on Facebook. “The biggest feeling Sean and I both have is that we are just so grateful for each other, grateful for our family and friends, and grateful to God for the friends and families that this marriage is bringing together,” Katherine wrote to me, a few weeks ago.
Maybe gratitude isn’t always easy. But when it is found, when it is honored, when it is sustained, it makes everything so simple, and that’s the thing about Katherine and Sean’s love. It is uncomplicated. It is therefore good.
Astonishing things happen in grace. Life is lived bigger through awe. Katherine alone is a wonder, of course, but Katherine with Sean is something approximating a miracle. They together remind us what love can be—how full of giving, how without limits, how holy, dear, and fulgent.
Happy Wedding Day, dear Katherine and Sean.
St. John's Presbyterian Church celebrated Reverend Victor Wilson's twenty years with us today—and said goodbye to a family it is impossible not to love as Victor gave his final sermon. Morning and evening were Victor's themes. The responsibility we all have to carry memory forward, not as a burden, but as a gift. The Wilsons will live among mountains now, birds, open air, artists, dulcimer songs. They will visit with their beautiful girls, walk Carolyn's children to school, bless Katherine's upcoming wedding to Sean.
Will you grow old with me? Victor asked Jane, his fabulous red-headed wife, at his sermon's close.
And I thought to myself that that is perhaps the most romantic question a man can ask a wife.
Health and happiness, Victor and Jane.
Here are those Wilson girls—Jane, with music in her heart, Katherine, our sensational, happy, smart, loving, and blog fabulous
Newlie, and Carolyn, with whom I could stand and talk for hours, and why, oh why, can't we have more hours? We did not pre-color coordinate (those Wilson girls have other things on their minds), but I suspect you won't believe me. But I am proud and lucky to know this family, and to have known them for so long. Every radiant inch of their outsides is equaled by who they are within.
Gorgeousness is also my friend Kelly Simmons (
The Bird House, Standing Still), who drove all the way out to Exton, PA, to see me today. I love Kelly, and I love that she surprised me, and I'll never forget us rearranging the mall furniture so that we could pretzel ourselves up and talk books. I only wish I'd thought to take your picture, Simmons.
SIMMONS?! :)
Kelly, thank you.
In the writing of the slender book that became
Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, I moved in several directions before I settled on a form. For a long time the book was a collection of stories about people, most of them imagined, who lived by or near the river at different junctures in time. Today, I was remembering a piece I'd written about a character I'd originally named Lennie—a young woman who goes to the river in the 1870s to row. This is a fragment torn from the original draft. I publish it today in celebration of all my friends who do row or have rowed that river, including Katherine Wilson and Pam Sedor. I publish it, too, in celebration of all of us who work and rework our books, who keep thinking them through, until they are the best that we can make them and the world makes room for them.
She wore her scull upside down on her head like a hat, her hands on the riggers. She rolled it over and laid it down, pulled the oars through the chokes, fastened the gates, and settled her heart. She planted her feet in the stretchers and oared her way out, her back facing forward, her mind on her father’s words: Shoulders to the sky, Lennie. Knees at an angle. Catch and drive and always finish. Feather the blades so you’ll fly. She left her hair loose, a dark burst about her face. She let the breeze into her blouse. She listened to the river, and to what the river had to say. She went and she went, always beginning.
Toward the wirework of the Girard Avenue Bridge. Toward the ghost of John Penn and the animals that had come to town in ’74 to live in their fanciful abodes: the Fox Pens, the Wolf Pens, the Raccoon House, the village for the prairie dogs, the stoned-in pits for bears, the house of birds. It was coming on to four o’clock, and she rowed: oars in, oars out, the commotion of animals up the hill. A hawk, she noticed now, had flown in from the east, its red-tipped wings and tail mirrored in the river’s surface. One of the reflected wings kept breaking apart and resurrecting itself with each of her oar strokes, as if it could attach to the scull its own flight.
So beautiful. Gave me chills (good ones).
A lovely blessing for this young couple! May their joy only expand in their years together.