Hannah & Will at Christ Chapel, Litchfield

Hannah and Will wanted February, specifically February, because nobody else would. “We’ll have everyone’s full attention,” Will said, “and the inn will have a fireplace.” Both true. The Litchfield Inn was ours for the weekend, and every guest who arrived Friday got a room, a fire, and a map of the snowshoe trails.

The snow started at four in the afternoon on wedding day, which is the kind of gift you cannot schedule. By the ceremony it was fat, quiet flakes on the chapel’s stone shoulders, and Ochre Light Studio shot the whole afternoon in blue-grey light with warm windows behind us. Hannah wore her grandmother’s fur stole and carried white ranunculus with the stems left long and bare — The Peony Post’s idea, and it photographed like something out of a Dutch painting.

The sparkler tunnel happened at dusk, in eight inches of fresh snow, on the chapel path. Lantern & Beam handed out long-burn sparklers and lit them in sequence so the tunnel built itself from the far end toward the couple. You can see their breath in the photograph. You can see the snow on Will’s shoulders where Hannah had already brushed it off twice and given up. DJ Ada Reyes had wrapped the reception by ten so the exit would still be dark — the one schedule change I made that week, and the right one.

Back at the inn, Stone Soup Catering had hot cider and cider donuts waiting on the steps, and the fire in the main hall had been stoked since five. Fifty people stood around it in coats and wedding clothes, steaming gently, drinking cider. Nobody wanted to go upstairs. I let the timeline slide an hour; some things are more important than schedule.

Hannah’s card to me said: “Everyone keeps saying it was brave to do a winter wedding. It was just a wedding. It was ours.” Correct on all counts.

— Simone