Sammy & Dylan's Wedding

Rhizome Springs, Salt Spring Island

Their invitation opened with a line I haven't been able to shake since: to love is to commit to presence, even as everything changes.

Sammy and Dylan were legally married five years ago, in February 2021, at the skating pond in Canmore. Just the two of them. No gathering, no vows spoken aloud, no community standing witness. What they built in the years since went through what they described as many deaths and rebirths, and by the time they sent out the invite for August 8th, this wasn't a wedding so much as a deliberate re-entering. Same marriage, different understanding of what it was going to mean.

The venue helped make the case. Rhizome Springs sits deep in the forest at the top of Mt. Tuam, about forty minutes out of Ganges on roads that make you grateful for whatever suspension you've got left. For most guests that's a proper pilgrimage. For us it was a short hop, one of the quiet privileges of living here, so Chrissy, Tycho, Luna and I rolled in without much fuss and with a baby who slept through the ascent.

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We arrived in the middle of the afternoon into full, unfiltered heat. You forget how long the sun holds on the west side of the island — you're aimed straight at the sunset, and the light just keeps going and going. Everyone found shade where they could, layers came off, and the warmer clothes the couple had wisely told us to pack sat in the car waiting for their moment. Through gaps in the trees, the ocean sat there flat and bright, doing most of the decorating.

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The ceremony started at four. There's something particular about watching two people say vows out loud after they've already lived five years of the answer. Nothing was theoretical. They'd tested every promise before they made it, and you could feel that in the room, ahem, the dome. About seventy-five people stood witness, which is exactly the number where a crowd still feels like a gathering of individuals rather than an audience.

Food and reception followed, and then the speeches, which were the real event. Funny, unguarded, occasionally devastating. The kind where the person speaking stops for a second because they've caught themselves off guard. Nobody was performing. Between courses I kept ending up in conversations with people I'd never met, and not one of them was small talk — everyone had arrived open, which I suspect had something to do with how carefully Sammy and Dylan framed the whole thing as a conscious, intentional container.

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What struck our family most was simply being there. This was a gathering of their closest people, and to be counted among them felt like a real thing, not a formality. Tycho ran feral through the trees with the other kids until dusk. Luna got passed around and admired by strangers who didn't stay strangers. To have all four of us present for an evening this important to two people we care about — that's a blessing, and I'm using the word properly.

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By seven the music started and the light finally began to go, that long golden collapse over the water that Salt Spring does better than almost anywhere. People danced. The layers came back out of the cars. Some folks stayed to camp on the land and eat breakfast up there in the morning.

We drove home down the mountain with two sleeping kids in the back, quiet, full of it. A truly beautiful afternoon, in a place that earned every bit of the effort it takes to get there.