Bread, Salt and Wine

Saturday was our engagement party and houseblessing, and probably one of the best days of our life together.

Ever since we found our house last spring, people have asked us when the housewarming would be. Now, some people seem to be able to unpack in a week or two, maybe a month or two... not us. We were combining two households and storage units into one, we had the massive expense of my car repair and we had a house to furnish.

It took six months. Hey, I'm pretty sure I was three years into my post-divorce apartment before I got this far. As it was, in the weeks before the party I was still dashing madly around, getting the last few bookcases to finish the library, picking up a ficus at Garden Ridge...

In the meantime, Jimmy tripped on something and asked me to marry him. The question everyone asked after "when is the big day?" was "when is the engagement party?" So we decided to combine the two into one event, which might actually return us to socialization after six months of crazed unpacking/working/traveling.

The trouble with planning a party among our friends is that we have... a wide variety of friends. We have friends from the convention circuit. We have friends from church. We have friends from work... well, I do. We have friends from the kid stuff. We have all these circles that don't often connect with each other. Better yet, try finding a time, day and place when all these people are free.

So we decided to have an all-day open house, so people could come and go as they liked. After calling up caterers and take-out places and laughing hysterically at the prices, I decided to do the cooking myself.

I planned meals in stages with plenty of appetizers and beverages. We bought citronella torches for the back yard around the firepit to stave away mosquitoes, and Jimmy fired up ol' Betsy (his gigantic Man Grill that was his birthday present from me and my folks this year). I bought a sheet of wedding scrapbook paper for people to leave messages that will go into our wedding album.

And I created a slideshow of photos about 20 minutes long that ran in the living room. It started with me as a little girl and Jimmy in the Air Force - which was about the same year, heh heh heh - and went through our youth, meeting on the book tour, falling for each other, introducing our kids, living together and getting engaged.

There was the mad flurry of cleaning and shopping beforehand. There was the last minute rush to finally finish unpacking - except for those last few boxes of papers. I started cooking on Wednesday. Quiche and banana bread for the morning crew. Hamburgers, hot dogs and chuckwagon beans for the lunch crowd. Pork steaks and red potato salad for dinner. Appetizers included a cheese ball, veggies and dip, swedish meatballs in homemade sauce and baked brie. Desserts included chocolate fondue, a cookie platter, Mom's Kickass Chocolate Pecan Pie and my pitiful attempt at a tiered white cake. Homemade lemonade, iced tea, coffee and my mom's citrus punch recipe, or an approximation thereof.

And we were a tad nervous, too. I wondered if it would be so crowded that people would be uncomfortable... or worse, nobody showed up and we felt like idiots. Would people really spend part of a beautiful Saturday just to wish us well on our engagement and new home?

It couldn't have gone better.

Our friends started showing up about an hour after we opened the doors, and we had a steady flow all day and into the night. The house was never empty. The slideshow got so many viewings that I'm still hearing the music in my head two days later. We had just enough food; the only thing we overbought were the hamburgers, and I can understand why they didn't go so quickly; to everyone who ate them, I'm very sorry and we will not cheap out next time. I will go cut up my shoes and barbecue those; it'll be a better texture.

The lunch crowd should have come back for the pork steaks at dinner. Jimmy outdid himself. Yum.

The highlight of the day was when my dear friend Macie conducted the houseblessing. Macie will enter seminary next year, so this was her first run at blessing things. Technically you do not have to be ordained to bless a house; Mother Bennett had told us we could do it ourselves if we needed to, and she was unavailable due to a severely broken leg.

Macie did a wonderful job. We found the official format in the Episcopal Book of Occasional Services, and we began at the entrance and worked our way through the major rooms in the house. (Yes, there's a blessing for the bathroom. I had an attack of the giggles. I can't help my irreverence; it always amazes me that lightning has never struck me in our services.) The candle we lit stayed glowing on the dining room table for the rest of the day.

For all the jokes we made about our ghost and Macie's role as The Exorcist, it was a very special moment for us. I've never had a house blessed before, perhaps because no place has ever felt like home as much as this place does. I've had apartment after apartment, and even the duplexes I shared with my first husband still felt like waystations. This house is our home, our new life as a new family. It wasn't just walls and floors that Macie was blessing; it was our family, and it was very special to us.

And then we were back to the partying. I don't think I sat down for more than five minutes at a time all day. Whenever someone left, two more someones would arrive. And despite insisting that no one need bring anything, we received such bounty that it left me speechless. Not just gifts of decoration to add character to our home; gifts of meaning, like a starfish passed down from a friend of the family who died several years ago, or an Indian blessing upon our house, or the rainbow cross Macie used in the houseblessing.

One friend brought the traditional bread, salt and wine: bread, so the house will never know hunger; salt, so that life will always have flavor; and wine, that joy and prosperity may reign forever. That's a paraphrase from It's a Wonderful Life, of course, but the tradition holds still.

Speaking of wine... apparently our friends think we need to drink more. Oh my! We took a picture at the end of the evening with the numerous wine bottles we have collected. Never mind all the beer they didn't drink; when you consider that Jimmy and I will generally make a bottle of wine last six months to a year, we are stocked for wine until our tenth anniversary. We would be the world's most inefficient alcoholics; neither of us can finish a beer, we have to split it. I said that we will have to have another party just to use up all the wine!

Things started to wind down later in the evening, and our last few guests left about 10 p.m., our stated closing time. Katie stayed a little while to help us clean up, but surprisingly, there wasn't much to do. Our dear neighbor Cindy had wandered into the kitchen and did the dishes already, and the boys had kept the trash cleared pretty well. Within half an hour, the leftovers were packed up and the house looked great.

And then I sat in my living room and marveled. So many people came by to wish us well, not only in our home, but in our new life together. People came from around the corner and across the river. Many more sent well wishes through the internet, since they couldn't come. It was humbling and powerful to be the recipient of such love.

I've known for some time how blessed I am. It was a beautiful day to be reminded of it.

I think we'll celebrate with some wine. We have plenty.