My very good friend Megan got married this past weekend, but I’ve been too tired to talk about it until now.

This is what we did on one and a half fantastically humid and hot days:

Picked up flowers, rolled napkins, tied ribbons, picked up more flowers, remembered to eat, cut large squares of kraft paper (strangely, more difficult than it sounds), bought burlap, stencils, made table numbers, made centerpieces, stole some weeds from a neighbor’s front yard, made 3 bouquets, 2 corsages and 3 boutonnieres (thanks youtube!), hammered holes into cardboard (no hole punch), made tissue paper poufs, drank root beer, listened to at least 100 10-second snippets of possible father-daughter dance songs, remembered to eat again, and oh yes, changed for the ceremony.

Unexpected maid-of-honor (me) duties included: Corralling an incredibly inebriated guest, figuring out when a champagne toast occurs, finding flowers for the cake decorations, cooling off by walking out into the rain, getting a heel stuck in the ground while walking down the aisle, and slipping on some mud.  At the same time.

The wedding itself was perfectly and awesomely low-key, pretty, and most of all a ton of fun, with great music and delicious barbecue.  When it came time for the toasts, the boys all decided to wing it in, while I, the petrified public speaker that I am, decided to do very regimented notecards.  (Nerd.)  I read a passage from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that I remembered Megan declaring in college was the most romantic story ever written. It goes like this:

In the fall, I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night, just over Laredo Border in Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, “Go moan for man,” and clomped on back to his dark.  Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America?  I struggled and hurried to New York, and one night I was standing in a dark street in Manhattan and called up to the window of a loft where I thought my friends were having a party, but a pretty girl stuck her head out the window and said, “Yes?  Who is it?”

‘Sal Paradise,” I said, and heard my name resound in the sad and empty street.  

“Come on up,” she called, ” I’m making hot chocolate.”  So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long.  We agreed to love each other madly.

Congratulations again, stinkfaces!

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FYI, should you find yourself in a corsage/bouquet making emergency, these two posts were incredibly helpful.

A Practical Wedding: How to Make A Wedding Bouquet

Lovely Crafty Home: How to Make A Corsage

Thanks internet friends!