In choosing where to host our wedding, we looked at what was around us, the world we already inhabited. We crafted our wedding to be a reflection of that place. Why create some other world to live in for a day? Commitment is all about day-to-day partnership, the long years of companionship. It can be rough to get married in a fantasy land filled with horse-drawn carriages and then find yourself riding back to your apartment in a hatchback the next day.
For us, we wanted to reflect the two people we are and the space we inhabit, not some foreign dreamland that we could visit for a day before returning to our real life. We didn’t look at wedding magazines; that’s not our world. For inspiration, we looked at wedding photos from people who lived lives like ours, but ultimately, we crafted our vision for the wedding based on the life we live and the people we live it with. And that vision started with the physical location.
Our venue was a study in taking the path of least resistance. I grew up in the shade, raised in a log cabin that my parents built in the rainforest of Bainbridge Island, which is a thirty-five-minute ferry ride due west of downtown Seattle. Thirty years ago, the community consisted mostly of old money and young hippies (guess which my parents were), but the population has since doubled, and the island has evolved into more of a typical Pacific Northwest suburb, filled with polar fleece vests, overpriced SUVs, and latte-gripping mothers with frosted hair and the funds to pay a mortgage on waterfront property.
It’s an insular community, and as provincial as you would expect for an island. It’s also unbelievably beautiful and is the perfect place for a wedding—even if you weren’t a cedar-sheltered Islander child, which I certainly was. The forests of Bainbridge Island drip with moss and lichen and the smell of living things becoming soil. And so we selected a venue where we had an abundance of space and the easiest access: my mother’s ten acres of forested island property and her neighbor’s small bed-and-breakfast.
