Outdoor weddings are a highlight of my spring and summer as a harpist—the sunshine on the bride’s smile, the soft breeze lifting the sounds of my harp, the mosquitoes on my arm. . .
Ok, there’s a problem! I can handle my music blowing around, I can handle the swift moving sun and shade, I can handle hauling the harp and fifty pounds of equipment over hill and dale to the beautiful gazebo. But it is really difficult not to interrupt the Pachelbel’s Cannon mid phrase when I feel a bug land on my upper arm! The bride is coming down the aisle, both my hands are caught in harmonies and I’m supporting a $12,000 instrument on my shoulder and I start frantically batting at a bug. . . not a pretty picture.
When I play an outdoor wedding, I expect to be ducking mosquitos, flicking ladybugs off the harp and still finding ants crawling out of my music books three days later.
But this year I played a wedding full of a different kind of bug. After the “I dos” the couples completed their service with a butterfly release. As I unfurled the beautiful melodies of Bach’s Prelude No. 1, they unwrapped a cage of monarch butterflies that danced out in all directions, a reverse confetti gravitating toward the sky. The flower girl and ring bearer, no more than three years old, tottered after the bright wings which flew always one step ahead. And one of those incredible iridescent insects landed on my music to take a breath. I was playing All Things Bright and Beautiful
.
Have you ever held a butterfly? It makes all the other bugs worth it.
“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.”
Cecil F. Alexander,