Social Note

One of our favorite, and most indulgent, bits of newspaper reading is the Sunday, New York Times wedding feature. You not only get to vicariously attend a (usually) lavish event involving (usually) socially prominent people, but you also get a lot of inside info on how they met, how he, or she, popped the question, and all that.

We don’t usually deal with weddings here on the farm. Oh, we grow flowers for plenty of weddings at other venues, and we’ve even made the odd exception, (once.) Still, this is a  working farm, not a wedding palace, so as a rule–no weddings.

 But then, what’s the fun of rules unless you get to break them. And break this one we happily did this season after Devin Bodony and Robin Briggs came to us and asked if they could get married here this year.

Now you have to understand a couple of things about Devin and Robin. Devin, at 25, is one of the first of the Wise Acres kids to grow up and move out into the wider world. He’s a big, strong guy who can bike faster, swim longer, run farther than pretty much anyone else in these parts, and he also has that great intellectual quality, a probing sense of curiosity. He’s a cool guy. Judith and David Weinstock, Devin’s mom and stepdad, are arguably the hub of this remarkable community (we posted about Wise Acres back on May 10 here .)

And Robin…well, Robin is something special. She’s smart, she’s talented, and did we mention that she’s also stunningly beautiful. We haven’t seen her leap any tall buildings yet, but she’s clearly in the local Superwoman mold.

How could we resist, plus we’d get to go to a party that we knew would include knock-your-socks-off eats and terrific music. 

Here’s how it all happened. Devin and Robin were schoolmates at West Sound Academy–she two grades behind him. They hung around some back then, but weren’t anything more than small-school friends. “He was a major hippie,” Robin says. “He wouldn’t wear shoes and things like that.”

“She,” says Devin, “was definitely smart, quiet and…elegant.”

But still, just friends.

High school ended and Robin headed east to Sarah Lawrence. Devin became a serious bike racer and moved into a rental house with a couple of other guys at Miller Bay Estates. When Robin got home the next summer she showed up at a campfire party at the house. Something clicked, as these things sometimes do, and the next day they started dating. ”We figured out there was something there,” Devin says.

When Robin went back east for her sophomore year, Sarah Lawrence just wasn’t as exciting or interesting as it had been the previous year. She started suggesting to her family that she might take off the spring semester and come back west. “I had all these reasons why I should come back,” she says. But her grandmother, who listened to all those reasons, figured it out, she says. “She knew the real reason was Devin.”

Robin came back, got an apprenticeship on a farm–not this farm, but one close by. She and Devin spent the winter and spring building a little house in the woods just down the road and moved in together. One evening last July, they were sitting on the hill overlooking our farm, dreaming about their future together. Just like that, Devin asked her to marry him. She said yes.

The whole thing, they both admit, was kind of spontaneous…kind of. “I had been daydreaming about asking him,” Robin says. After Robin said yes, Devin made her ring in his stepdad’s jewelry workshop at Wise Acres.  Among his other talents, he’s an accomplished goldsmith.

The nuptuals (as they say in New York Times wedding-speak) took place at 5 P.M. on the 14th of August under the massive big-leaf maple tree, just below the yurt meadow on Persephone Farm.

And here we need to break off for a minute because–we missed it.  After months of planning, weeks of prep work, days of mounting excitement, we blew it and got sick at the last minute. Fortunately, there are plenty of pictures to give you an idea of the ceremony and party. The one we really like (taken by Devin’s aunt, Shelley Weinstock) is this one and if you want to see more click on this link here to see Shelley’s full-bore slideshow.

Robin and Devin

A few additional facts. The wedding crew roasted two pigs, a goat and half a lamb for the dinner. Kate Briggs, Robin’s sister, baked enough panna cotta cheesecake to feed the entire West Side of New York City–we’re talking 350 hungry guests, and there were leftovers.

food

There were two bands, plus this crew that played during the service. They were still dancing at 3 A.M. when the cops came and told everyone to keep it down because they could hear the music in Suquamish, five miles away.

music men

 Perhaps the NYT wedding reporter had another engagement for that evening but we’re told they missed the party of the year. The bride and groom leave Monday for a two-month road trip around the west. When they return, they plan to live in Indianola in that little cabin they built themselves.

And we hope be happy forever after. 

 Persephone