Two Loop Walk # 16: Annelies is married!

Cloudy, -7: I don’t know if I’ll walk today but it is a day for remembering.

Twenty years ago today, Bill and I woke to a bright Sunday when the snow sparkled like diamonds and it was 40 below. I put on my best dress, the one I bought four years earlier for our first date, and Bill put on his marrying and burying suit. We went to the Explorer Hotel for their elegant brunch buffet and when friends saw us there and asked why we were dressed up, we said “just because.”

After brunch we drove through the cold brilliance, 100 kilometres down the highway past Rae until we got to Frank Channel, a small collection of houses on a waterway that connects the Great Slave Lake with a smaller lake. There, in the kitchen of a JP’s house, with the JP’s wife and someone, also named Bill for witnesses, we got married. We hadn’t told anybody.

I was nervous and elated and mad bad jokes about the JP marrying me to wrong Bill by mistake. Bill’s hand shook when he put the ring of Yellowknife gold on my finger. When it was done, a wind of happiness swept through me. We had brought a slab of cake which we shared with the JP and the witnesses. Then, laughing, we were on our way into the day that now seemed brilliant just for us.

We bumped into a friend who was living and teaching in Edzo and she had us over for an impromptu wedding tea. Later that night, both Bill’s daughter, Lynda, and my mother were inspired to phone us, although they didn’t know why. My mother who had given up hope that her youngest daughter would ever settle down was jubilant and sang at the top of her lungs to my Dad in another part of the house “Annelies is married! Annelies is married!”