The Backyard Wedding Under the Cottonwood

The Olsons

Dale and Marlys Olson have lived next door since before I moved in. Dale is seventy-four and retired from the grain elevator. Marlys runs the funeral lunch committee at our church. They went to every one of Abby’s volleyball games.

Marlys heard about the wedding from somebody at church before I could tell her. She came over that same evening with a pan of bars and a box of string lights.

“We bought these for our fortieth anniversary party and never used them again,” she said. “They’re the good ones, with the big bulbs. Dale wants to hang them himself.”

“Dale is not getting on a ladder,” I said.

“I already told him that. He says he’ll hold it and boss.” She set the box on my counter. “Tanner can climb. That boy climbs poles for a living.”

So on Labor Day weekend, Tanner went up the cottonwood on Dale’s old aluminum extension ladder, with a coil of lights over his shoulder, and Dale stood at the bottom with both hands on the rails telling him where to go. “Left. No, my left. Higher. That’s a good branch. Don’t trust that one, it’s punky.”

Tanner climbs poles for a living. He said “Yes sir” to every instruction anyway, and I loved him a little more for it.

Halfway up he stopped and looked down at me. “Lori, you know there’s still a swing up here?”

“I know,” I said.

It was two ropes and a board. Greg hung it the summer Abby turned four, with marine rope from the farm store and a board he sanded himself. He climbed that tree without a ladder, because he was thirty-one. I stood at the bottom and yelled at him the whole time.

When he left, I meant to take it down. I never did. Abby still sat on it sometimes as a teenager, when something was wrong, and I did not want to take away the place she went to be sad.

“Want me to cut it down?” Tanner said. “It’s kind of in the way of the lights.”

Abby was standing on the patio. She had not said anything in a while. “Leave it,” she said. “Please. Just go around it.”

So he went around it.