going to the chapel

My sister got married. It’s crazy, really. My little sister who used to run around the house alternately pretending to be a cheerleader or a softball player while simultaneously driving me up the wall, is married. Life in my family has shifted. Dynamics have shifted and will never be the same. Anna no longer eats dinner with my parents every night and instead has a kitchen of her own. I can no longer call Anna wondering why in the world mom doesn’t hear the phone ring. Even at Christmas, Anna is no longer the one we attempt to drive crazy by sending her on a scavenger hunt throughout the house to find her Christmas presents. Jared is now the one sent searching throughout the house for one of his presents. This change is a welcomed and celebrated shift, but a shift that I think everyone in our family was shocked to feel so deeply during the wedding weekend. My sister has a new family now. Such a simple sentence, but the reality is anything but simple and dismissible. Maybe the approaching wedding was why went spent night after night before Christmas watching one family video after another reminding ourselves of who we were and clinging for a few more minutes to the past, not quite sure what to do with such ambivalence about the future.