Tuesday, August 5, 2008

A Shotgun Wedding!

A Shotgun Wedding


Mother of the Bride is a role I enjoyed four years ago when my daughter married her long-time best friend. Four years later, my son-in-law resides in another state as he prepares to deploy to Afghanistan and my daughter is back home. Separated by twelve hundred miles. On their fourth anniversary last week. Well, actually the fourth anniversary of their second wedding.


They’d married the first time a few months earlier in a judge’s office so they could be added to a military housing list for married couples. She returned to college, he to work. Five months later, they married again at a beautiful gazebo on the outskirts of town. Thank heaven we have video proof of the events of that evening. Let’s just say it wasn’t a traditional wedding in any sense of the word.


The early evening sun smiled down on them as they exchanged their vows in front of family and friends. And a mule. Tears filled my eyes as I gave my daughter a hug and hurried to my front row seat. But laughter quickly dried my tears as I watched the groom and groomsmen roar around the block on their Harleys before taking their places to wait for the bride and her attendants. The girls arrived on a cloth-draped hay wagon pulled by a Oliver tractor. The sun couldn’t compete with the light shining in my daughter’s eyes as her father and step-father escorted her, skipping, down the grass aisle between numerous guests perched beneath two large canopies, followed by a handful of friends and relatives bearing guns. Not for the reason usually associated with shotguns at weddings, but because guns and country wedding just seem to go together here in the hills.


Oh, and that mule? He was ridden to the ceremony by the groom’s father and laughed and brayed as only a mule can do just as my daughter spoke her vows.


The wedding cake, three sheet cakes iced in green with a ribbon of gray to represent a road into the future, complimented cups printed with two tiny angels and inscribed with my daughter’s and son’s-in-law names, the date, and the words "The Ride Begins." Their honeymoon was a two week Harley ride across part of the USA, ending in Sturgis, South Dakota just in time for the annual motorcycle Rally.


As the mother of the bride, I know for a fact that while they’ve hit a few bumps in the road, the love they felt for each other during their non-traditional shotgun wedding grows stronger every day.



Denise

posted by Susan @ 3:00 AM