I pick up the third of what was the NYC BFF triumvirate, Megan, in Columbus. She looks 32 years of fabulous in her summer dress and thrift store necklace of a wonderfully large daisy held to her throat choker style by a thin silver necklace. Her hair is auburn and wild, her laugh like a benevolent thunderclap, her view of life is one of an appropriately jaded Pollyanna.

She drives as I flip through my iPod for mood music. Today is an Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin kind of day. The road is mostly two-lane, lined with thick trees, only dotted with an occasional passing car.  There is something deliciously otherworldly about traveling throughout space and time for a while without having contact with, or even seeing, anything or anyone else around you, as if the controller of Time had pressed the pause button, and you know it, and so you flow through the universe on what feels like borrowed time, until you reach your destination, and you feel the play button pushing you back into reality.

  As we close in on Athens, there are familiar, and unfamiliar, sightings of Midwestern roots. A sign on the side of the road boasting “Fresh Georgia Peaches.” (Familiar) Two Gun-and-ammo stores and a non-descript white wooden building on which the only discernable sign or marking is “Fun Barn” painted crudely a placard in green with a green and white awning. (Very unfamiliar and creepy) And, as in every college town, streets upon streets of simple two-story houses boasting a great front porch upon which one will always find one to two couches scoured from the great depths of Midwestern basements. Bonus points for plaid.

Now, about this house on the river. Jeff is an outdoorsy guy, and master craftsman, and so, he has spent time adding little embellishments to the house. The formerly open air deck now has a very cool pirateship-esque looking canopy cover over it, and the steep slope down to the river has man-made wooden stairs which only the most experienced and adroit can walk down forwards like a staircase. I am neither, so I turn around and climb down a la ladder fashion, back ass wards. (Marit and Jeff can do it with a beer in their hands) I feel dirt and cool water rush into the ‘lake sneakers’ I have borrowed from Marit. I wiggle my toes, the rough, grainy dirt rubbing in between my feet and the sneakers like a natural exfoliate.

The river looks like a vat of milkly coffee, but it is warm and as calm as a pool, so we grab our rafts and tubes, I stifle my pampered, indoorsy self, and in we go.  But now comes the really fun part. Jeff and Marit being Jeff and Marit have designed and built a revolutionary contraption dubbed the U.S.S. Snack Raft. The U.S.S. Snack Raft is, to get down to it, a floating beer and snack cooler.  It is a wooden square about 2 feet by 2 feet mounted onto some man-made material that floats (that ‘floating noodle’ material used in water aerobics classes? Ask Jeff, I’m just a writer) and a hole in the middle into which fits snuggly a simple bucked filled with ice and beer of choice. Today it’s Budweiser. (In retrospect, anything better than Budweiser would have spoiled the illusion.) We paddle the U.S.S. Snack Raft out towards the middle of the river and drop anchor, which is half a cinder block. There are also on the Snack Raft hooks upon which to attach the rafts and tubes, freeing one of actually having to paddle twenty feet or so back to the raft when the current takes one downstream. I ask Jeff what prompted him and Marit to build the U.S.S. Snack Raft.

“Because!” he said, “it was necessary!” I agreed.

If you’ve never floated in a warm Ohio river with cheap beer with your best friends as small, benign rainclouds occasionally mist you from above, you really should. As city-fied as I am, I can, on this day and under the influence, imagine why my mother spends hours in her garden every day, and why Matthew Maconahay takes cross-country RV trips. When it comes to the great outdoors, I am a whole-heartedly enthusiastic observer, not a participant. On many bus trips through France, we would stop at ‘rest stops’ in which the “toilette” was a hole in the ground surrounded by three walls. I waited. Nature is an acquired taste, but, if swallowed, can leave a nourishing aftertaste.  

As we floated around, sans clock or care, we were privy to an up close and personal view of the mating ritual of the dragonfly. A pair of them, clearly en-media-orgasm, bounced around our group from raft to raft, knee to knee, arm to arm.  I was an unabashed voyeur, blatantly staring at them throughout their indiscretion. Suddenly, I yearned to be a dragonfly. Having sex on a river swarming through the air freely.  Seeing dogs mate is different. They know what they are doing, know people are watching, and do it anyway, because it’s their nature. But the dragonflies….they were oblivious to our intrusion, caught up in the simple and infinitely complex act of connecting to another living thing, their wings frantic and high on the knowledge of borrowed time, squeezing the utmost potential of the moment and of their sheer existence out of every automatic flutter. Yes, I want to be a dragonfly.

In true Marit and Jeff fashion, they are getting married at the city courthouse at 1:00pm on a Friday.  Incidentally, today, Thursday, is four years to the day that they met. Their bachelor/bachelorette parties are a co-ed affair at a pub we have decided upon because it has ping pong. (Athens is a college town, after all) This is why they are so disgustingly cute to be around:

Marit to Jeff: “Hey, I think we should get married tomorrow.”

Jeff to Marit: “Great, but it’s about 4 years too late.” (Meaning that, since they day they met, they had been so fused together as to make a single piece of paper uniting them superfluous)

They are each other’s sun and moon. It’s fantastic. It’s enviable. It’s disgusting. It seems to be the real thing. I say “seems” because I am merely witnessing the conjured island of their couplehood which no one but them reside on from my biased and murky shore of singledom. When I asked Marit how she knew Jeff was the one, her eyes became stars, but all she could do was shrug her shoulders almost apologetically, and say “I just know.”

I pressed for details. “But how do you know?”

Her shoulders answered again for her. “I just do.”

It was sweet. It was infuriatingly maddening.

The courthouse is a white brick building with a single entrance marked “City Building.” We arrive about 12:45 and are directed upstairs. The clan of 20 of us ambush Marit and Jeff sitting patiently on a bench outside the little drive-through looking window through which serviced everything from marriage licenses to drug violations. The young early twenty-something standing at the window was obviously embarrassed to have a gaggle of strangers witness his transgression. His dilapidated sneakers can’t get him and his abused liver out of there fast enough. Marit was levitating out of her short black and white sleeveless dress, a dress she had worn before and a dress that she will wear many times after. It could have been a potato sack for all she cared. Jeff was freshly scrubbed in a crisp short-sleeve shirt and slacks. If harnessed, the wattage of their smiles could have powered the entire Midwest. They were the model of patience, posing for an endless round of pictures with everyone as we waited to be ushered into the small courtroom.

Finally, a man who seemed the approximation of a small-town bailiff opened the door. He scanned our crowd, looking for someone to direct his directions to. The size of our gaggle seemed to be a novelty to everyone.

“Ok, everybody, you can come in now.” He said. We cheered like spectators at a sporting event.

We entered the room along with the bride and groom, the mood akin to entering a highly anticipated private carnival ride.  Rows of chairs were divided by an aisle, as in a regular church. With no usher to guide us to the ‘groom’s side’ or ‘bride’s side’, we improvised seating, forming our own special blend of side, the “Marit and Jeff” side, everyone sitting united and together in a sanctuary of peace and love.

The justice of the peace wore an official black robe like a judge, and he was extremely surprised to see so many people file in. His garb and the setting immediately turned the mood serious, in a good way, as it suddenly dawned on everybody that whether we were standing on a picturesque cliff in Malibu, St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York City, or a court house in Athens, Ohio, matrimony is serious stuff, requiring a serious stomach and serious sense of humor.  The words were simple, elegant and heady. Do you take this man to be your husband?  As my friend Megan remarked to me later, “I can’t even commit to a plant.”  I’ve always liked the words husband and wife, admiring from afar their elegance and adultness, knowing that I am, at age 34, still not grown-up enough to wear a ring that says that my kayak is now a canoe. Forever.  I couldn’t help but noticing upon the exchanging of the rings that Jeff’s hands trembled. But they were not trembling out of nervousness. They were trembling from unreserved adoration of another person and the feverish desire to weld their two lives into one officially. I say officially because they have really been inseparable since the moment they met. When Megan and I had shopped for wedding cards the day before, it had been, like trying to keep two magnets apart, useless and frustrating. Marit and Jeff were not starting their life together, as Hallmark had us believe.  They had lived together for three and a half years. They had two dogs together. They had been sharing a life. And they couldn’t even wait for the “you may now kiss the bride part” before they snuck a kiss, much to the bemused chagrin of the presiding judge. And that, I think, is the trick. To be so in love that you tick off the judge with your false-start kissing.

 Saturday night is the big celebration at the house. On the menu: Turkey burgers, chicken shish kabobs and corn to grill throughout the afternoon for those of us who will basically be there all day. Or, I should say, floating on the river drinking Budweiser all day. Then for the wedding feast: 21 assorted pizzas from the local pizza joint accompanied by homebrewed beer. The house sported white Christmas lights and a plethora of wildflowers, torches, paper lanterns, and candles.  Somewhere around 7pm, Megan and I changed directly from swimsuits to clothing, no shower. I wore a $5 dress from the local thrift store, my bright orange flip-flops that happened to match, and not a single smear of make-up. Megan paired her thrift store find with a chunky necklace and plastic earrings. And, in our thrift store duds, we were overdressed. (Did I mention floating on the river all day? And the beer?) Around 7:30, Jeff and Marit gathered everyone around and recited a few personal vows they had written together. It was absurdly them and utterly perfect.