Reflections on our 25th Wedding Anniversary

I don’t really think of myself as a sentimental person. I don’t hang on to stuff too much, my memory is shoddy at best. But over the weekend I was reminded that on Tuesday, June 10th, my husband Ed and I will celebrate our 25th Wedding Anniversary.

 “Wow- Is our 25th wedding anniversary is on Tuesday?” pretty much depicts the moment we experienced a shared realization over coffee on the deck on Sunday. I was actually going over the calendar so that we could have a visual of who’s coming when either to play, to stay or to just be in our guest house. The Lawn needed mowing and the sheets needed to be changed and the house spruced up for the next group coming by. A quarter of a century. Silver anniversary, a symbol of radiance, brilliance and strength in a long relationship.

Since that moment over coffee on the deck while creating the to do list for the Guest House, I’ve been flooded with memories of that weekend and been reflecting on the life we’ve lived since, right here on our tiny Peaks Island, in the beautiful city of Portland, a little city by the sea.  

Friends and family were arriving from all over the US and Canada. Our Peaks Island community opened their hearts and their homes to help us pull off what was a very grassroots home spun do it yourself potluck wedding before do it yourself was trending. Our friends took care of gathering and arranging flowers from gardens all over the island, our musician friends came to offer their musical gifts to the celebration. Friend cooked food, one family member baked and brought the wedding cake from Canada and assembled, frosted and decorated the cake on site. The whole endeavor was generative in spirit. We created a framework and our folks just filled it in with the love they felt for us. What a gift.

Filled with hope and love, we undertook the vows to love each other for who we were, for who we are and for who we’re becoming. That is still true to this day and my heart is full of gratitude.

At that time, we had two kids we now have four. I had five living brothers now I have three. My father had passed away less than a year before and all of the other grandparents were alive and celebrating with us.

That’s the first wave on realization. Our nieces and nephews were all under 10 and now they are grown up some of whom have children of their own. And so, it goes…. Life everlasting, Amen.

What I remember is the warmth of the weather and the community. Lisa’s bakery stood where the Inn is now and on our morning run with my friends, we’d see wedding guests taking in all that Peaks Island Had to offer. We saw enjoying the world renowned scones at the bakery and we saw teams of folks gathering flowers, and decorating St. Christophers and the 5th Maine.

I remember our family filling the top deck of the Machigonne while heading to a lobster bake at my Aunt Mary’s house to celebrate the evening before the wedding. I remember the balmy summer night on Scarborough Beach where we swam in our underwear and played frisbee and wiffleball on the beach and stuffed ourselves full of steak and lobster, corn and blueberry crisp. I remember how happy I felt to have our families together in this beautiful place. I remember feeling so deeply loved by my Aunt’s generosity.

I remember my friend’s playing music in the church and for the reception. I remember how we invited every niece and nephew to participate and be part of the wedding party. I remember dressing in my borrowed wedding gown in our wreck of a house on Central Ave and walking to the church. I remember the sweetness of my soon to be mother-in-law wanting to help me by buttoning me into my gown. I remember after the wedding how we paraded on foot all one hundred and fifty of us on foot to the 5th Maine where we dance and ate and played and celebrated the joy of our finding each other in Telluride at the Bluegrass Festival in 1997.

It’s humbling to think about how life and relationships grow and change. I think about the joy in sharing our celebration with our new community, our friends, both old and new and our families. How joyous it was to welcome everyone to the island to share in the joy we were feeling about having found this place to call home. Our life so full of love and promise.

We’d moved to the island the year before and bought our wreck of a home and we knew over time it would embody and exemplify the love and work of how we became a family. We felt embraced by the people here, welcomed into the fold of the Peaks Island community. We felt like we’d found our place and today that is even more true than it was twenty-five years ago.

This place and the people here became to stable platform from which to build a life. We volunteered, ran carpool, taught, gave, and received. This was all before we had cell phones.

In time, with work and school and jobs and friends we undertook the work of creating meaning and value in the place we lived. We gave back in an effort to pay forward our gratitude for having found our place to genuinely call home.

As our family grew, our relationships with the people and this place deepened. We fixed up our wreck of a house with the help of our friends and Peaks Island truly became our home. We began establishing traditions with friends as well as family. In fact, our friends began to feel like family. We had babies together; we care for and supported one and other through life’s hardships and celebrated our good fortune in having landed right here on this tiny island in a little city by the sea.

It's a lovely thing to be able to look back and notice the throughlines that tethered us to this place. There is of course my family connection to Portland, the place where my family arrived into from Ireland. How unlike so many US immigration stories we landed here and stayed here. Seeing this place as quite good enough to create life out of the opportunities and the hardships that came their way.

In that connection I find great comfort. I can see now through the sixty years of my life and the twenty-five years of marriage that so much of life just comes and goes. What I am most grateful for today is to have had the good fortune to be still enough long enough in this place to see the through lines of community, family, music, growing food, faith, work and generosity that fill and sustain me.

So, this week we celebrate. We will host a concert for our community and bring to life the living example of why we are so happy to call this place home. Our first home is now our Guest House where we welcome family, friends, and musicians to come and experience the magic of this place.

Jefferson and Steve will bring their brilliance to Peaks Island and I sure hope the spirit of experiencing what this place has to offer live and in person moves to open your mind and your heart and feel what we have been led to do over these past short decades right here on our tiny island in the beautiful little city by the sea. Let us not forget and fully embrace joy. being together in community remembering all that is good and celebrating together. Joy, kindness and generosity is our form of resistance.