A marriage license is a piece of paper that asserts a family into legal existence; Andrew and Gemma had one of those, filed and expedited and paid for, and it never made them a family, and their license is presumably dissolved now in some courthouse basement.

But a child’s crayon drawing of the people she loves standing together under the sun is not an assertion of anything.

It is a report.

It is a small witness testifying to something that already, unmistakably, exists.

Paisley did not draw us together to make us a family.

She drew us together because we already were one, and children draw what is true.

That is the difference between the wedding I missed and the family I found, captured better in wax crayon by a first-grader than I could capture it in ten thousand words: one was a document trying to create a truth, and the other was a truth that a document could only, belatedly, catch up to.