Love Is Sometimes a U-Haul

I just came home from a week in Toronto for my brother's wedding. It was a beautiful wedding and, in many ways, a magical week. But when I think about what stayed with me most, it isn't actually the ceremony or the flowers or everyone dressed up and dancing. It was my parents.

In the days leading up to the wedding, I watched them quietly throw themselves into making something important to my brother happen. My mom stayed up until two or three in the morning helping arrange flowers. My dad loaded a rented U-Haul with decorations, drove everything from Toronto to Burlington, unloaded it — and then, after the wedding, essentially did the whole thing in reverse.

There were boxes everywhere. Flowers everywhere. Things forgotten and remembered and moved from one place to another. Everyone was tired. And my parents just kept showing up. I found myself surprisingly moved by it.

There wasn't anything particularly glamorous about what they were doing. Nobody writes wedding vows about loading a U-Haul. There was no grand declaration of love in staying up too late arranging centrepieces. But maybe that's partly what made it so beautiful.

I've been thinking since coming home that sometimes love is simply making someone else's important thing important to you.

Not because you would have chosen it. Not because it's particularly convenient. Not even because you fully understand why this particular thing matters so much. It matters because they matter. I think we often recognize love most easily in its bigger, more obvious forms — weddings, anniversaries, declarations, celebrations. But so much of the love that actually holds our lives together is much less glamorous.

It's the ride to the airport. The meal dropped off. The phone call when you're exhausted. The flowers arranged at two in the morning. The boxes carried because someone you love needs help carrying them. Maybe that's what devotion looks like after all. Not always extraordinary sacrifice. Sometimes it's just saying, in a hundred ordinary ways:

This matters to you, so I'll help you carry it.

And sometimes, apparently, love is a U-Haul.