Having been born during the Martin Luther King riots during 1967, I was roughly 100 years too late to go to a Dickens’ wedding.

I read a lot of Dickens in my teenage years (all of them) and the endings often boasted the most delightful weddings. The highbrow weddings were elegant: the painfully-in-love true bloods almost always bore great sorrow with their stark beauty in their wealthy surroundings.

Ester Summerhill.

Agnes Copperfield.

Lucie Manette.

They suffered for love.

But you also had to assume they served a good fucking wedding cake. Right? Something massive, five tiers, thick white frosting. If invited to a Victorian wedding party for a Dickens’ aristocrat, hell yeah, I’d go.

When the Victorian 99% tied the knot, you couldn’t always count on wedding cake.

Oh, their weddings definitely had cakes: jelly roll cakes, half-frosted, sideways cakes, fun cakes made by devoted children who did not understand the difference between flour and sugar. Even breakfast cakes. But these weddings also suffered more shenanigans, like the jelly roll cake toppling and the closest toddler eating it from both paws. When discovered, he blinks at the wedding party in wide-eyed astonishment.

That kind of thing.

Then an aged parent bumps his head hard and everyone cries and kisses him over and over.

It’s a thing in Dickens’ weddings:  everybody laughs. Then, everybody cries. Then, everybody laughs again.

These weddings boasted quirky artistic spaces, mis-matching twinkling lights adorning a boarded-in yard, lots of home-baked treats, succulent meats, random candle light, and everyone in love with everyone else. Children are serious and adults laugh like children. Inevitably, some minor Dickens’ character usually got tipsy and confessed his love for another minor character whom you had also come to deeply love. For the next two months they would avoid each other for the sake of British Modesty and soon thereafter would wed.

If a racous wedding hosted by the Micawbers conflicted with Lucie Manette‘s swan-studded afternoon tea ceremony, I might have to send Ms. Manette my deepest regrets and most sincere congratulations for scoring a French nobleman. Who cares that he’s disgraced and penniless? You got a title, girl!

This weekend, I attended my very first Dickens’ wedding.

On October 27th, Meg and Austin married each other in a lumberjack-themed wedding in northern Minnesota. My goddaughters were Paul Bunyon and Babe the Blue Ox. Everyone wrapped themselves in colorfully-knit afghans (courtesy of the bride and groom) and witnessed Meg and Austin share their love amidst the Lake Superior’s stark beauty.

I ministered the service.

The day Meg called to invite me to marry them, she cried hard and then I cried too, because I love being loved. We laughed, cried more. She is a queen who inspires my heart with her optimism, pragmatism, and her every Scribblenest creation is infused with hand-loved, good cheer. Love swirls around her way other women wear perfume.

Her father died recently and even in her raw grief for him she exudes this great love. She is not immune from life’s hardships and I’m sure she has her days, but she chooses to respond to life by loving it.

Everyone promised how easy it would be to acquire a ministry license online. Maybe it’s easy for some. Not for me. I was misdirected to the wrong office twice and I finally found a triage administrator who confirmed I had at last found the right place, but then looked at my offering and said, “Sorry, you don’t have the right paperwork. You have to order the letter.” It took two more tries before I finally nailed it.

Only three weeks before the wedding was I legally capable, far too close a call for me.

But today, I love that nerve-wracking experience , because I see the universe setting me up. The whole thing felt like an’ ill-disguised Dickens rant against insanity of government and complexity of bureaucracy. I suspect Bleak House‘s anti-heros, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, placed their invisible legal stamp on my paperwork.

A few weeks ago, Meg cooked the three of us amazing Indian food so we could discuss wedding details.

She bustled around the crock pot, while Austin and I, both eager to help, stood in the kitchen mostly in her way. Austin entertained me with volcano stories, the latest curiosity to snag his intellect. The world fascinates him. Meg served us sumptous curry and various Indian delights. Their home glows with the warmth of their life, interesting tree branches collected, knick-knacks, cat toys, and Meg’s  self-portrait of Austin and herself crafted in felt.

They wanted the service short, because they invited family and friends to stand with them on Artists’ Point overlooking Lake Superior. Very windy. Weather was likely to be in the 40′s. Or 30′s. Probably not the 20′s. No, it would more likely be snowing than that cold.

They were iffy on the whole, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ line, and in the end, they kept deferring to me, telling me to say whatever felt right. That night, we decided on nothing more than my minister outfit: my camo pants and red flannel. We did find it rather amusing that we are an Iowan, an Illinoisian, and a Wisconsinite leading this lumberjack wedding party to Grand Marais, the heart of the north shore.

We love being Minnesotans, even if we are adopted.

We love this damn state and the character that shaped it.

Meg emailed me a week before the wedding, sending a story she wanted me to consider reading at her wedding, a cute tale about two dinosaurs who fall in love. She emailed me back a few days later to say, ‘Forget it. Do what’s in your heart, that’s what I really want.’

Adorable, right?

Austin is also a Dickens’ escapee from a Victorian era. He sports a fierce red, sea captain’s beard which, we discovered several weeks ago at breakfast, holds up to 7 full-sized crayons. My younger goddaughter initiated this experiment while the rest of our breakfast party made snarky observations over bacon. Austin kept offering greater access to his beard, occasionally blinking wide-eyed in ticklish surprise. The first time I met him many years ago, I found myself struck by the everyday uniqueness of him  and I loved him when I saw his email included the words ‘fascinatedbydinosaurs.’

I thought, ‘who the hell is this king?’

The wedding party hit Grand Marais Friday night. (To my west coast friends who wrestle with geography in ‘fly over states,’ that’s about five hours north of the twin cities.) It’s the ‘up ‘dere’ part of Minnesota that is oft teased. After checking into their various motels, the wedding gatherers partied at Sven and Ole’s Pizza Parlor. Saturday morning, the men followed the groom on one hike and the women followed the bride on hers.

Nice. I like symbolism.

I arrived Saturday noonish with Mary, a mother of my goddchildren. She and I laughed for most of the five hours’ drive that morning except when I snored in the passenger seat or asked her for last minute advice on my wedding speech. We were so engrossed in our this delicious, uninterrupted time that during the last twenty minutes of our five hour road trip, I said, “Oh, we forgot to listen to music.”

Saturday afternoon, everyone draped ourselves in colorful home-knit afghans and followed Paul Bunyon and Babe the Blue Ox out to the sun-dappled rocky plateau. Instead of rose petals, Paul and Babe spread bio-degradeable cocoa chips. (In the brief lull before the wedding party assembled, we took turns deeply inhaling the cocoa basket while attempting to convince The blue Ox not to taste them.)

Meg and Austin followed those Minnesota legends, Meg wearing her her home-tailored dress, adorned with felt shapes and words she turned into artful expressions of joy and love. Austin wore a suit that made him look incredibly distinguished and European. Upon seeing him, I realized that not all men who can wear suits well choose to wear suits. He sported a jaunty fedora that made him look fetching but also like a lost German tourist. Whenever Austin beamed in our direction, we all raced in to hug him.

I followed wearing my camos, a red dress shirt and tie, bearing my favorite well-worn axe from the garage.

Meg and Austin found their spot, the one that felt perfect.

Any lingering skeptics finally understood why Meg and Austin had picked this miraculous setting for their wedding. The sun beamed madly on us after a mostly-cloudy day, the rocks reflecting the joyful hard light right up in all our faces. Nearby wet rocks were soaked as the sun bit them and they would not release the light. I felt like we stood on a black, sparkling diamond while cold waves relentlessly chiseled the stone, shaping it.

Some do not appreciate Minnesota’s starkness, it’s raw beauty. They cannot feel the sheer power in a land that is cold, do not feel the beauty of woodsy survival, and don’t understand that we might actually bless another winter night by fire light. Hey, I’m not all poetry and sunshine about Florida in June, so I do not expect everyone to share this unique flavor of love.

But please know that it exists. We of the frozen land and many lakes feel it.

All our out-of-state wedding guests felt it that day, too. All of us stood around and gaped, many wrapped in afghans, understanding this rare beauty, the gift of this October day. Guest gift bags supplied hand warmers, knit caps, and local fudge. Nobody suffered out on the rocks.

I won’t repeat most of the ceremony and certainly not Meg and Austin’s vows. While I love blogging about my life, many moments are too important to share. Those words, the marriage vows, these will remain a cherished memory for the 60 or so who stood in mid-40′s temperatures to watch Meg and Austin beam right back at the sun.

The reception?

Well, think quirky artistic spaces, mis-matching twinkling lights adorning a boarded-in yard, lots of home-baked treats, succulent meats, random candle light, and everyone in love with everyone else. Apple cheddar pie, grasshopper mint pie, blueberry pie, a flourless chocolate cake. A red velvet cake and many different cheeses. Tender strips of pink-hued steak, hot from the grill.

My new friend Noah and I shared a glass of rum punch while his daughters ran up to him, waving their glow sticks. I chatted with Libby and Brenda from San Francisco, and they expressed their surprised delight to party outside in northern Minnesota. My friend Heather and I bantered playfully with John, recently moved back from Switzerland.

We drank, laughed, and took turns exploring the knick-knack filled house that they had rented for the party, an art gallery and old curiosity shop. We warmed ourselves in the backyard around three different pit fires, laughing, toasting, discussing the beauty of the day and gossiping about how much we love this couple together.

Since many have asked me ‘what the fuck was up with that axe?’ I do feel compelled to share the last bit of Meg and Austin’s lumber jack wedding. I can share this and still honor the privacy of our Dickens’ wedding party.

As part of the closing remarks, I said, “Long before horror movies, the axe was used to create and sustain life. Up here in northern Minnesota, they chopped down trees and made homes for themselves. Split firewood, necessary to survive the winter. Built lives for themselves. With no axe, there was no way to build your life together. So, by the power of the Universal Life Church, Hennepin County, and this big, ol’ axe, I now pronounce you Minnesotians.”

Everyone cheered and waved their colored afghans.

Meg and Austin kissed.

Then we all cried.

Meg and Austin's amazing Lake Superior wedding