Does Anybody Want To Do A Blood Oath With Me?
In like a chill way...
My brother Harry got married this summer, about half a pedicure ago. The baby pink polish I got (for a discount because she made my toes bleed so bad) remains only so far as a French tip. I’ll be sad when it finally grows out. For now, my toes are a scrapbook entry from a long weekend that was momentous for everyone I love most. They’re the same toes that cold-plunged in the Arkansas River with my little sister Helen on the morning of the ceremony. They’re the same toes that danced to “Aww Skeet Skeet” with my dad at the reception. The same toes I had when I signed Harry and Emma’s marriage license as their officiant and witness to their union. ‘Til death do them part and everything!
Harry and Emma had asked me to officiate their wedding on Christmas morning, six months before, with little thought and certainly no planning. Each with one foot out the door on their way to Christmas II with Emma’s family, they were wondering aloud, supposing who’d be willing to do it, lamenting that it couldn’t be my brother Baird because he’d already written his best man speech and he didn’t want to have to write another. Only after I fake-coughed with such gusto that I choked on our egg strata did they ask if I might fill the position. And I said “sure” and my cheeks took a blush of pride so red it matched our ancient reindeer tablecloth.
Their wedding was in Buena Vista, Colorado (pronounced Byoona Visstuh, they insist) which is a town that exists only to be gorgeous. Like a decorative chair or a mermaid. It’s beautiful in a green screen way, in a staring-directly-at-the-sun way, in a can't-catch-your-breath way (My great aunt Amy needed an ambulance.)
It’s a mecca for the happy go lucky, all tactically calloused skin and waffle knits, eating an egg burrito before they hit the trails. I am good at having a really good time, but I am not chill. And perhaps never less chill than there, in the stark contrast posed by a population of people who sleep soundly in hammocks and drive Subarus with novelty plates that read things like “CO V1BEZ.”
And by the time the rehearsal rolled around, I could feel my intestines clotting like a hairball. We were gathered in the courtyard of the “Chateau,” a horseshoe-shaped building of hotel rooms right on the river bank, where the night before we’d stayed up having chips and beer ‘til 1AM and where the next day we’d hold the ceremony. We were all dressed for dinner, I in my first of two pink skirt sets for the weekend, Emma, goddess-like, in a flower crown her mom had bought her, and my brother Harry in a suit that was really well styled, perplexingly.
Harry and Emma and I had agreed they wouldn’t see what I’d written for the ceremony before the day of their wedding. I was regretting that deeply now, my stomach lurching to the top of my high neck blouse. Isn’t there some third thing we’re missing that makes this legit? Why would they ask me to do this I am so short and stupid? Get the priest in here! This is Godless!
I’d pulled back the velvet curtain and found myself there, holding a white binder from Staples with a manicure that was already chipping. Here, in this space that just last night was littered with Corona bottles and joint ends and Ruffles, would be where I united Harry and Emma together until they die. Let me stress again, I was wearing a pink skirt set.
I asked the wedding planner over and over if I was forgetting something. Insisting that I must be. Pop-quizzing her on the order of operations, I do, ring, I do, ring. Kiss. That was it, she assured me. No robes, no magic. This union would be formed for the fact that we said so, in front of everyone Harry and Emma love.
And it was. The chairs filled with aunts and grandchildren and Harry’s best friends from middle school, a glittering sea of boutonnieres and Dysoned curls and heirloom jewelry. I read what I wrote. People cried, not to brag, Harry and Emma said vows and looked at each other in a way that made me feel bashful and when they walked back down the aisle arm in arm as man and wife, I had no doubt about it.
We’d done something ancient. Something innate, like dancing or kissing. Something verging on alchemical. With belief and will and (sorry) love, we’d conjured the sacred and eternal just there on the riverside. A binding ritual, forged with words I wrote in a Google Doc and an aura of something much much bigger than me, presiding over it all.
My mom didn’t tell me this until the farewell brunch, but as soon as Harry and Emma asked me to officiate, she called her friend Kate Kelderman. Kate is an Episcopal priest, and my mom begged her to be on standby. She needed someone with a direct line to heaven who could step in and ordain the situation should my pagan rites fall short. When my mom talked to Kate after the ceremony, though she thought it was lovely, she lamented that there was no element of religion, no mention of God, that it was just shy of holy. But Kate waved that notion right off. “Oh,” she said. “God was there.”
It wasn’t the first time this summer I'd felt that ineffable presence of whatever you want to call it, God or otherwise. It was a summer full of ritual for me. The feeling was there at my friend Sophie’s wedding, one month before, in the backyard of her childhood home. We, the women, set the tables with antique lace Sophie and her mom had been collecting all year. The men built a pyre of hot coals and seaweed for the reception lobster bake. Sophie looked down from her bedroom, her face glowing against her white silk robe. I was holding a butter knife in my hand, setting it down to the right of full-moon white dish, and it hit me then, too. A sensation akin to deja vu, thinking about girls just like me setting tables just like this on the mornings of their own friends' wedding days, for centuries. Placing an essential utensil, using my own hands in concert with so many other hands to create a sacred ceremony right next to the garage.
I felt it again in late July, when I went to visit Kate Kelderman and her family in Kent, Connecticut. We sat in the backyard for dinner and before we ate, we all held hands around the table and Kate said grace. Just that did it. Heads bowed over fish tacos. Holding hands in a circle.
It’s earth shattering to realize that something bigger is always at our fingertips, within arms reach. That all it takes to transcend is to set your ego aside, to do something otherwise deemed uncool (share feelings, hold hands), and to do it with a group of people doing all that, too. But rituals like these are much harder to come by than I'd find ideal. First, by necessity, because something special becomes less special for overexposure. But it feels that at the crux of the matter, the reason rituals of the holding-hands-in-a-circle ilk have gone by the wayside, is that they’ve become roadkill to our obsession with Me.
Communal rites have been replaced by individual ones. My morning ritual (POV come with me to romanticize my life with latte and journal). My skincare routine, holy water turned to micellar. Daily supplements from a company called Ritual — transubstantiation to a better you. Manifestation is the new prayer, supplanting what was a conversation, a negotiation, with a series of statements all centered on “I.”
Knowing how to make the time I spend with myself as special and meaningful as possible is a gift. I can’t function without my runs or my daily french press. But I think I learned to do this best when it was by necessity. Mid-Covid, depressed, out to sea in suburban central Virginia and clinging to anything that made it feel like my life wasn’t passing me by. I labored to sanctify my solitude by compulsion, just like everybody on my phone was doing, too. All getting ready with me, alone together.
But this summer felt like an invitation to recalibrate — to deprioritize self-care. I feel best when I’m thinking much less about “I,” and even better when I’m making someone hold hands with me. I’m becoming kind of narc-y about it, trying to get as close to blood oaths as I can at all times. “Let’s make meaningful eye contact until we’re ready to tell secrets.” “I think we should try hugging for one full minute because that’s when the effects really take.” Insisting at my roommate’s birthday party that “everyone has to say one nice thing about Isabel before they can have shrimp.” I will draw the line at sacrifice, however begrudgingly. I won’t say I couldn't be convinced.
Loved it! Brought tears in parts, it was so touching. A big, long hug, Nonna
Kate your writing is so phenomenal and I’m stuck on half a pedicure ago