Good Morning.
Today would be my husband's and my thirteenth wedding anniversary. The ceremony was held with only our children, their spouses, and a close friend at a gorgeous Episcopal church on a rainy afternoon when the city was under a tornado alert. The minute I was inside the building, I located a stairway to the lower level and then set off to find the groom and tell him that we might have to get married in the basement.
Even though it was November I was not about to have people dressed in turkey brown with pots of chrysanthemums sitting around in a cluster of gourds and pumpkins. Jamie's favorite color was blue but he was particular about the shade that he couldn't explain except it wasn't navy and it wasn't powder. I finally found a velvet blazer in a deep, rich teal for my daughter, the matron of honor, to wear over a mid-calf length black dress and he thought it was perfect. That set the color scheme for the wedding. All the men would wear black or gray suits and ties in the deep blue teal that I had no trouble finding. What I would wear was much more problematic. I didn't want white that wasn't appropriate or any shade that had even a tinge of yellow in it because yellow makes me look as if I have jaundice. I didn't want beige, dusty pink, or any other Medicare color. I finally found something in pale silver chiffon that was not my dream dress but was okay. The flowers for everyone and for the altar were red roses because Jamie sent me an abundance of red roses to woo my very independent self at the time.
Despite the coordinated outfits, we were a screwy bunch. Some of us were Catholics in various stages of practice and lapsing and the rest were Protestant. Some were Republicans, some were Independents, and some were Democrats. Some were carnivores and one was a vegetarian. My beloved and I exchanged the traditional vows, minus the obey nonsense, of course, and we had communion for everyone, whoever and whatever we were. Here's the deal about that one: Jesus beckoned people, even screwy people, in fact especially screwy people. When he did the loaves and fishes thing, nobody was told to go eat somewhere else.
We had hauled all of the furniture from the living room into the garage except for a large Steinway grand piano. We brought in bistro tables and draped them with black, floor-length cloths. A single rose sat in a pottery vase on each table along with white candles. Some of the food was catered with some prepared by the bride and groom. I had, in my nervousness, chilled the red wine and left the white on the counter when I departed for the church, but oh well. We had lovely music through the sound system in the house and a fire in the fireplace. We had a small but fabulous wedding cake with a huge chocolate bow. The rain was then gentle but steady, the toasts were warm and funny, and forty-five years and five months after Jamie and I had first laid eyes on each other in high school, we were finally, irretrievably married.
We delayed the honeymoon until the following September. Our children gave us a week at a rustic resort in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and we took along the dog because by that time, Jamie was so attached to her that he refused to put her in the kennel. The three of us settled into a cabin with a fireplace that provided the only heat during chilly nights at an altitude of 7000 feet. We went to Mount Rushmore but didn't go into the tourist part; instead we picked up a couple of coffees and parked by the side of the road to view the monument against a perfect sky that gave the color its name. We went down a scary, winding road that made me do slurping noises with my mouth that were not appreciated by the driver. "Wait 'til we fly together," I told him. "I claw the person next to me and scream the Act of Contrition." "We used to drug my mother," he remarked and I told him I'd rather drink.
We went to see the buffalo herd at Custer State Park and chased a couple of truants down the road. We drove through Spearfish Canyon when the aspens were at their bright mustard-yellow, fall foliage peak. We went through Deadwood but with a passenger in the back seat, didn't stop for a beer at the No. 10 Saloon where Wild Bill Hickok was shot while playing poker. On the way home we went through The Badlands, an amazing, slightly eerie collection of buttes and pinnacles that rise from a vast expanse of prairie grasses.
The trip was a brilliant idea for a wedding gift. We didn't need another toaster of some hand-painted dessert plates. We wanted thirty years together even if half of them were spent in a nursing home. We got seven but they were yummy.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
P.S. We had only one serious fight during the time we were married and the next day he sent me roses but they were orange.
He hated orange.
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