The Lawn at a June Wedding

At four o'clock on the first Saturday in June, the folding chairs are going down, and the lawn is winning. It slopes a little, the way backyards do here, and every chair finds a different angle. One leg lifts off the grass, and a man kicks dirt under it until the frame stops rocking. The woman who will marry at five is keeping to the house, so the rest of us are doing the work that weddings leave to their guests. Nobody minds. The grass was cut that morning, and the stripes are still green in the long light.

The ceremony faces the rose bed because she wanted roses in the pictures. The bushes are in their first flush, the red ones darker than her dress, the white ones already going soft in the afternoon. June in this part of the country is a month of humidity, and the yard is doing its part. The air at five o'clock is thick, and the napkins set out with the lemonade are damp before the first glass is poured. The woman beside me knows what the lawn will do. She has worn a heel into the grass, and when she stands for the vows, slowly, the turf swallows the heel and she walks clean out of her shoe.

By the time the vows are over, it is not yet six, and the sun is still high. June sunlight stays. The reception is set under the big maple, where the string lights hang in the branches, dark and lifeless at this hour. They are just wire and small glass bulbs until the sky gives them a job to do. There is still an hour of light left when the cake comes out, and it is white with strawberries inside. This is a June thing, not a decision. The bride's grandmother, who is eighty-odd, cuts into it and holds a slice up for us to see, the red at the center like a door she has opened.

The long evening has a middle stretch, from eight to nine, when the sky stays blue, the string lights come on anyway, and the yard turns into a photograph of itself. The fog starts in the low spots and pulls in across the lawn. The mosquitoes arrive with it. The woman of the sunk heel has borrowed a shawl, a beige one with a fringe that lives in the back of a closet for a decade and comes out for June weddings, from an older man who keeps his jacket on all night. She sits on the steps with the shawl pulled to her chin, watching the lights.

The older guests leave at around ten, in a block, as if there had been an agreement. The grandmothers go first, then the aunts, then the uncles. The driveway fills with red tail lights. Somebody carries the cake knife to the kitchen. And once that is done, the yard belongs to the people who keep lights on late.

The music has been playing all along, but it has only now become the point. The bride's younger cousins are the first into the middle, having waited all night for the floor to open. Two friends move the folding chairs out of the middle and stack them in the grass against the fence. A man takes off his shoes and dances with the woman who lost hers, both of them barefoot, the borrowed shawl folded on the steps. The string lights flicker once, a real flicker, and hold. The first firefly goes up from under the maple, then three more, then a dozen, low over the lawn, with no visible effort, the way it happens this time every year.

I stay until the beer runs out and the tables have been cleared into the garage. The bride and groom are still at the long table, barefoot, sharing a piece of cake off the same paper plate. The moon is up over the fence. The air finally turns cool, the way June air does, sudden and almost careless. We leave all at once, into the dark, and the string lights stay on behind us.

The next morning I am back with the cousins to break the chairs down. The dew is still on the grass, and where each chair stood, the whole Saturday is pressed into the lawn in a grid of darker squares, like a map of where we sat. I leave them that way. They will be gone by noon anyway, and the yard will close itself over, the way the grass at the rose bed is already closing over the woman's heel print.