So we were married, and the ceremony was attended and the wine flowed and there was dancing. We had an excellent photographer, Josh Rigsby, who really made it look sharp. He’s submitting the whole thing for publication, and so I wrote this little blurb to accompany all of the photos. At any rate, happy March.

We were sprouted in the grey-black pluff mud of the Lowcountry, my siblings and cousins and I, and we spent our summers swimming in the warm brackish water of the River that flowed past our dock at Foster’s Pointe.

Foster’s Pointe was magic. To children, the smallish plot of land outside Hollywood, SC was a vast wilderness, where we caught fiddler crabs by the water, climbed the branches of the great Live Oaks, played hide-and-seek in the dense grove of Camellias my great-grandfather had planted decades before. We helped our parents clear brush in the Summer heat, helped build the house when it grew too small for the thriving family, roasted marshmallows over campfires at night.

I had my first oyster there, plucked directly from the River, salty and strange and slippery; my first sip of beer, which I found disgusting; my very first chaste kiss from the neighbor girl, who was a year older and- I believed then as I believe now- infinitely wiser. I am what I am because of the water and the land, and the Family that raised me.

There is a test for newcomers to Foster’s Pointe, whether friend or lover. The test was handed down from the Aunts, whom we love and fear and whose word is final, Amen. The test is very simple: they must love Foster’s Pointe at first sight, or they are not worth keeping.

I didn’t have any worries about Amy passing the test. Amy is sensible. Amy knows a good thing when she sees it. And so when she first breathed in the salty-sulphur air of the marsh at low tide, she fell hopelessly in love. In the following years, we’d escape out into our wilderness whenever we could, and we grew together in the Lowcountry. When she asked to me to marry (Amy also knows when she has to take the initiative), there was only one place that either of us could see gathering our loved ones together to celebrate. There was no question.

With family and friends surrounding us under the live oaks, we were home.