12 frogs

This morning, we pledged our friendship, support, understanding, and love to each other, for good times and bad, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health.

This time around (nearly three years after our commitment ceremony) when we were pronounced married, it was legally binding. We’ve got the paperwork — two copies of a Certificate of Marriage, with the original placed on file with the Registry of Vital Records and Statistics — to prove it.

I had no idea how good those words, heard so often on television, heard at other people’s weddings, would sound when directed to us: by the power vested. This time, it went like this: “By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a Justice of the Peace, but most important of all, by the power of your own love, I now pronounce that you are married.”

Paperwork never felt so good.