We're back!

It’s almost six in the morning on Monday and I’ve put this off long enough. I thought I’d be saying something like, “I felt I needed to write this before I returned to my normal life,” but the truth is, I’m not – we’re not going back. I do need to write this while it’s fresh in my memory, though. There is some validity to that.

Ghost is here with me. He’s my White German Shepherd, btw, and one big baby who needs a lot of love from his master who’s been absent a week. Ghost is laying at my feet now. He seems a lot calmer after spending a week with my dad. (thank you, dad!) I feel a lot calmer after spending a week exploring with my wife.

There are a lot of stories I have to tell about our wedding; there’s the 12am-3am bolo toss my best man Jason and I did on the morning of the wedding to get that drapery up over the event. There’s all the work and love and friends that worked so hard at making it happen. We were overwhelmed by gifts of time and labor and money and stuff and food and all the myriad everything that went into our wedding day. There was how awesome everyone looked and all that they had to say – for some things, like Aaron Klinefelter’s homily, there’s a transcript I’ll be able to get. For many others, their words were as ephemeral as the last warm day of summer we had for the celebration. There was the drag queen, the decorations, my dad crying, my mom, Beck’s mom and dad and my grandma crying, there was me crying (!) and the wonderful food and wine and the gifts…there is so much to say about the wedding! So many stories that will reach your ears an so many that won’t. The honeymoon – The five breakdowns and kind strangers on the road, god’s presence along the way, my brother and sister-in-law’s place in Mississippi and the cop who thought we were trafficking crystal meth, our neice and nephew, the long, sometimes crabby drive to Cumberland Island, Julie Gross’s awesome tent we borrowed, the deserted beach and the armadillo (and dozens of other animals we saw) the dinner on the island and our new friends from northern GA. The trip to the Okeefenokee Swamp and our guide, Omar, the big hotel room and how great the hot tub felt after camping in the wilderness, the dinner at Bogden’s (sp?) Creek in St Mary’s, the headlight that went out and the hitchhikers we picked up, the barnstorming plane and the abandoned slave houses in Georgia. The drive home at 4am! (so tired) Ghost’s tail and wiggling butt when he saw us come up the drive and breakfast with Kenny Oster on his 36th birthday after we snoozed a little while.

Ahem.

These things are all parts of the story we’ll slowly be telling you over the course of (I imagine) the next few weeks. But what I really want to tell you about now is the feeling, the emotion, the spiritual closeness to my wife and god that I felt in the last week. That’s the thing, more precious than the memories, that I want to hold onto. I want to keep a little fragment of these blessings bottled away in a mason jar like the sand I took from the island. I want it to remind me in hard times that I and we are loved in infinite ways beyond description.

I shook with exhaustion and emotional overload when I stood up there with Becky on that day. Since then, god removed the cause, but not the symptom. I’m still shaking in awe on this morning. And Ghost, Tony and Angel (dog and two cats) are glad we’re home.

Steve Novotni
October 4, 2004