My parents were married in the summer of 1996, when they were barely adults, navigating the world of love and growing up together. Though I was there at their handmade Celtic inspired day, I was too young to remember. I hear they danced barefoot in the grass, that my mom held me tucked on her hip while she said her vows, that every one of their family and friends pitched in to cobble together a dream.
But the one thing they didn’t have from their wedding? Any good pictures. A friend shot a few rolls of film for them, but many were blurry or out of focus. All were badly composed. When I used to pull out all the family albums as a child to look the photos of my chubby little brother, and my toddler self drinking smoothies in nothing but shoes and mismatched socks, I usually skipped the wedding album. I thought it was boring. Nothing was beautiful to look at, there were lots of crooked photos of people I didn’t know.
You can imagine my excitement when my parents told me they wanted to renew their vows in Switzerland, and that they wanted me to be their photographer! I was giddy. I would get to write a new family history, this time in pen and not just in pencil. These would be the photos my children and grandchildren could look at one day, when the blurry 4X6 prints stuck under plastic from their first wedding had started to fade.
We all stayed for a few days in a wood chalet perched on the side of a steep grass hill in Wengen, Switzerland. Cows grazed around us and then the meadows plunged down into a deep canyon below. Mountains that looked like they belonged only in stories towered on all sides. The town is very small, there are almost no cars at all, and when we arrived we all made the sometimes precariously steep trek down from the train station, suitcases pulling us more than we pulled them.
It was a joyful, hilarious, and sometimes frustrating affair, cramming the family into that little chalet. There weren’t enough beds, so I slept in the corner of the dining room floor, a sheet pulled all the way over my head to deter the flies that came in through the big unscreened windows. No one could figure out the washing machine, which was meant to wash and dry all in one but seemed as complicated as a space ship. Some people snored, and other people recorded said snoring so we could all laugh hysterically about it the next morning. Wine was sipped on the porch looking over the valley. We took long walks, explored the local grocery store, and rode a gondola to the top of one of the mountains for one of the most beautiful hikes of my life.
The morning of the ceremony dawned bright and warm. My mom went out to pick handfuls of the wildflowers that grow everywhere in Wengen in June. The dress was ironed, hair braided, everyone laughing and talking and chipping in. I imagine the atmosphere of casual love filled that whole chalet with a sort of brightness. In the late afternoon, we all hiked up to the train station and rode up higher still into the mountains. We got off at a stop that no one else seemed to know about, the station of Wengernalp was a small deserted building and there was no one on the tiny platform. But stretching out on the other side of the tracks was a field of yellow wildflowers that tumbled off towards the mountains like a honey sea.
It was perfect.
The ceremony was simple, an exchanging of new vows and rings. My uncle played the ukulele and sang, a long time friend read some words he’d prepared, everyone cried. We all sat in a miss-matched half circle in the grass and watched them kiss with the mountains soaring behind them. As we all took turns giving messy unplanned toasts to their love, a beam of sunlight broke through the clouds that had started to gather, like some kind of sign. Nothing could have been more beautiful than that place and that moment, all of the scuttling clouds and swaying wildflowers and the white shapes of ice on the mountains seemed to exist just for us.
After the ceremony we all ran laughing to catch the last train down the mountain. My mom hung from the window, watching as the clouds swallowed up the last bits of blue in the sky as we rounded the bend and could see Wengen below. Just as we came into town the rain began, a pounding torrential rain that sang on the metal roof of the train and leaped like small insects when it touched the ground. We slipped and tumbled our way down to our chalet, everything soaked within minutes.
Dressed in dry clothes, we stuffed ourselves on cheesy fondue, raclette, and the most delicate sliced meats. Outside, the rain slowed, and then the clouds slid off over the peaks and the sky turned all colors of soft purple and pink. The mountains glowed. A small orange and white cat wandered down and sat outside, watching.
Nothing in the world was more warm and soft and full of happiness than that night.
