I’m standing in Joy's backyard at seven in the morning with kitchen shears, cutting Dalias the color of old bruises, because Joy called last week: take whatever you want, they're just going to keep blooming and nobody's here to enjoy them. Four more yards before the flower shops open. A list on my phone of who has what.

By Saturday, in two days, none of this will exist. It will just be flowers in a vase, looking like they always belonged there.

Nobody will know about the nine vases from three estate sales and two thrift shops. Or the ribbon I stood comparing for twenty minutes like it mattered — because it did, just not to anyone but me.

Same with the food. I hired someone to cook. I did not hire anyone to know how many pieces of salmon feed sixty people, or to build — because that's what it is, a build — a prep station with a sous-chef lineup of groomsmen who signed up for beer and got put on onion and carrot duty instead.

Nobody will taste the spreadsheet. They'll taste the salmon.

On Tuesday I wrote about a woman who traded a microphone for the unglamorous work of building something nobody would ever applaud. Infrastructure instead of a stage.

Hers left a mark you can see. Mine is built to disappear by Sunday morning. If I do this right, no one will know I did anything at all.

That's the job. We don't build the thing people clap for. We build the conditions that let something else get clapped for — then drive the borrowed vases back to the thrift shop.

Somewhere between the third grocery cart and the vase count on my counter, I stopped asking whether the wedding would be beautiful — I already know it will be — and started asking a harder question.

What have you built so well that no one knows it's there — and what would it cost you to let them see it, just once?

PS: thank you Mio Ito for the photo.