The weekend started calm, an ease and optimism...

The weekend started calm, an ease and optimism that floated everyone
through the next days, despite the elevated pace and energy of a wedding taking
place, my young brother’s to his longtime love. Nerves and excitement, a frenzy
of prep: of last-minute seating chart changes, of husking corn, of placing
lanterns, of practicing walking in fancy shoes down a mulched path that would
serve as aisle. The energy shifted – from
the lulled and lapping drift of late summer to a more fevered pace, still
optimistic and fizzing with joy like the sparklers that’d get lit late that
night, but faster, time accelerating, so when the music stopped and the dancing
ended, I said quietly to no one in particular don’t go. A day marking a celebratory moment of change. And change
stirs this time of year, here in September when it’s still warm, an itch for
different, an itch to make things happen, a gold-glow embered sense of possibility. I
woke on the morning of the wedding from a dream. In it, some adult said, ‘first
you’re a child, then you’re fifty. It happens so fast.’ It held the gut-punch
force of truth and jolted me awake. My heart thudded in the sheets as in the
aftermath of nightmare. It happens so fast. There’s so much still to do.