The road twisted and climbed to a retreat in the woods, aptly named “The Mountain House.”

With my husband, one of our boys, and many others, we sat on haybales and quilts and watched as the mid-August Adirondack wedding unfolded. We were surrounded by old maple sap buckets overflowing with flowers and had expansive views of the High Peaks, verdant grounds after weeks of rain, and the telltale sign of an event: a tent.

This mid-August wedding came on a sticky Saturday evening, hot and bursting with the buzz of toddlers squealing and squirming, dogs trying to catch Frisbees, and fresh, frosty lemonade. As the wedding couple promised to love their aging bodies, I thought about our own anniversary four days away.

If I were to do it all over again, I would spend more time on the vows, like this couple did. Our ceremony was five minutes long and I was sweating and the dogs were sweating and the old people wondered why we didn’t have rings.

A swarm of hornets in our field had forced us to relocate our wedding circle the previous day. We had family members read Japanese poetry that I cannot recall now.

I would’ve also included loving our bodies as they age. Or loving the house when only the drywall is up and no painting happens for years because we need silly stuff like a well and heating and floors and then the sewer line breaks one day when we bring a baby home. (Such a good story for the boy—they really do love bodily function tales—dad shoveled while I fed you in my arms on the couch, reading, sleeping and visiting with a friend while trying not to take a whiff.)

And my husband would vow to love the way I come up with dinner ideas I’d like him to shop for and make for me, please? He would also promise to add as many shelves as I want to my bedroom closet or surprise me with gifts he created, designed or assembled when I thought he was doing other work.

I would say to that new couple, the ones who married on a hot August day, I would say no one really has a house all organized like Martha Stewart, unless you are, of course, Martha Stewart. I would tell them to read Edna St. Vincent Millay aloud, because she had a lot of lovers and wrote all these deeply romantic poems.

I would say it’s a journey and not a race, blah, blah, but you have to have endurance. You have to believe the wine will wear off and you will still like where you are, you will compromise about going to the sci-fi movie as long as it has time travel in it, you will make mistakes and flip each other off, and you will dream and dream and hold each other when it’s hard, and laugh out loud at the private joke, despite the looks from everyone in Best Buy.

It’s all about the private jokes, the looks, and care and feeding and making it to the summit, together.

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