Skipping home last Friday from one of the nicest weddings ever I found, propped up against a chain link fence, an abandoned wedding album. There were no names or "please return to". It was a cardboard pre-fab pseudo-Victorian theme, the kind you buy at dubious and transitory kiosks in malls that have spaces for "happy memories", "good times" and "funny moments"...thereby obligating the couple to have photographic examples of all of these things. The corners were mashed and the spine was torn just slightly, and I couldn't pass it by. It contained images of a very young couple, laughing, outside and surrounded by friends. Although they had not had all the examples the album demanded page for page, each one was peopled with standard sized photos glued level and at jaunty angles, all affixed with some measure of care. They were married by a man in a black suit who smiled, and it was sunny on their wedding day.

And their album was lost to them. I don't know if they're still in love, or as happy, or if the loss was the result of a move, break-up or unhappily made shoulder bag. I did the only thing that felt proper.

I brought it home.

It's resting now next to a framed collage of me and couples, five weddings and all. I don't remember all their names. One was in Acton at a derelict mill, quite beautiful setting and a mature couple who's children became loved step children. One is of a pair of ladies, one bride had difficulty with her dad's disappointment that she was marrying a girl. We addressed his concerns during the ceremony and he welcomed his new daughter in law to the family afterward, teary eyes asking forgiveness for a narrowness of vision. Two more ladies at city hall, they were Buddhist and I met them for dinner years later. Two gentlemen at city hall, together more than two decades and Anglican priests; they had walked countless couples through vows they'd been denied and although they were looking forward to it, didn't expect the emotional impact of their own ceremony to be quite the punch it was. Such a blessing to have been there for them, I think of them often. The centre image was from a wedding at Sunnybrook Estates - it was overcast and spitting prior to the ceremony but just before the clouds thinned in a circle above the site and as the bride walked out, the sun came with her full on and gloriously bright. Magnificently radiant.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. It's a moment, a wedding is. It passes either into a fruitful marriage teaming with years of love or into dull acceptance or, sometimes, abandonment by a chain link fence. The heart may yet be broken, but I hope that if it is it happens as cited by the bride at the wedding earlier on Friday - that of "a heart broken wide", ready to experience life in all it's joys and fullness. She - the bride in question - couldn't imagine a better life than the one she'd had, spurred on by sudden rejection when she was 18. She toasted her groom at her wedding, and thanked him for leaving her then...and returning, many years later, when it was right for both of them. Their respective sons (now lawful step brothers) were their ring bearers that day, giving their new step parent the ring to be placed on their biological parents finger. Nearly grown themselves, the young men spoke of the inspiring nature of the relationship between the bride and groom.

And now I look at the lost album, unnamed and unsure of itself, sitting on my desk. I hope, that if these loving strangers fell away from each other after their wedding that their hearts were broken wide and they have the best, fullest, most meaningful lives possible. I pray, that in years to come regardless if they return to each other or not, that their children are able to glean an understanding of hope from them, able to look at them with awe.