A Birthday in Provincetown

 Twenty-one years ago Darryl and I married in P'town. Here is a reminiscence from my journal  of our delightful stay at the Land's End Inn.

August 5, 2004

 Birds hop from limb to limb in the garden, shaking water from their wings. The tiny lighthouse is just visible in the mist turning the sand dunes and marsh into the horizon. 

There are many gay guests at the inn, including a lesbian couple with children. It is "family week" here. 

There are writers and teachers here. They all know Michael Cunningham who lives in Provincetown and whose novel A Home at the End of the World I am now reading. It is a melancholy story, but the sadness is strangely comforting because of the love it conveys. 

We have filled out the paper work at City Hall for our wedding. An enthusiastic, gay, married clerk helped us with the forms and the required Syphilis tests which naturally came back negative. A Justice of the Peace will come to Land's End Inn to perform the ceremony. 

Guests of the inn are jubilant over the prospect of a wedding in the garden.

August 7

A bright morning as clear as a syllogism, cool and quiet but for birdsong and cooing doves, begins our wedding day and my 57th Birthday. The champagne is chilled and ready. 

August 8

Our lovely wedding ceremony yesterday moved us to tears, filling us with appreciation of one another. The Justice of the Peace, Joan Drysdale, gave the service a sense of importance and value. Several of the Inn's guests we had met and dined with, observed the wedding, helped with photos, congratulated us, and sipped the champagne in our honor. Darryl and I were both struck by the momentousness of the occasion, by the abiding love it embodied. 

The morning in the gorgeous garden of the inn was dazzling. It could not have been more perfect. After the ceremony and the champagne, we rested awhile, We followed Thea's (our host at the Inn) advice to have a picnic lunch. We walked to the park where the Pilgrim's landed. Afterwards we spent an hour on Herring Cove Beach. 

In the evening, we took the fast ferry to Boston. We checked in at the Crown Room where the head steward , also named Darryl, kindly upgraded us both to First Class for our flight home to Druid Hills.