The Wedding Under Grandpa’s Cottonwood

In April I saw Sylvia after church. She is a member at Bethany same as I am, and I play the organ there, so I see her every Sunday from the bench.

She sits in the fourth pew, left side.

That Sunday I caught her in the parking lot by her car.

It was a raw spring morning with the sun out and the wind coming straight down from Canada. She had her good wool coat on.

“Aunt Sylvia,” I said. “I wanted you to hear it from me. We’re having Brooke’s wedding in the hayfield. Under Grandpa’s tree. Two o’clock on the thirteenth.”

She looked at me and then at her car keys. “I’ve got the Fargo people at one,” she said.

“I know. We’re at two. You’re still invited. You were always invited.”

She didn’t answer. She got in her car and sat there with the door open a minute, and then she shut it and drove out of the lot slow, the way she always drives.

Gordy was standing by our pickup. He had seen the whole thing. He didn’t say anything. He just opened my door for me, which he does not usually do, and we drove home.

There was one more thing Brooke had wanted, and it was the thing I thought about most that spring. She had wanted lilacs from the home place in her bouquet.

My grandmother planted a long hedge of lilacs along the north windbreak on the home place, the late kind that bloom two weeks behind everybody else’s.

Every June they come in right around the middle of the month.

My mother carried those lilacs when she married my father. I carried them when I married Gordy.

Brooke had talked about them since she was a little girl picking them for my kitchen table.

She didn’t ask for them now. She never said a word about it.

She ordered baby’s breath and white roses from the flower shop on Main Street instead, and when the girl asked about lilacs, she said no thank you.

I knew why. So did I. You don’t go asking a woman for her lilacs when she has rented your wedding day out from under you. Some things you just let go.

May came in dry and warm. The alfalfa came up thick and green, a good stand.

Every morning at devotions I prayed the same short prayer: let it hold off until after the thirteenth, Lord, and then send us all the rain You want.

Gordy watched the hay like a hawk. First crop in eastern North Dakota usually goes down somewhere around the middle of June.

He wanted it off that field and baled a week before the wedding, so the stubble had time to settle.

He cut it on June fourth. A Thursday.