The Wedding Story

Sometimes real life can top all romances. Joselyn Vaughn is here to share her holiday wedding weather threatened to prevent. What a shame that would have been? Joselyn is the mother of three active and fun toddlers as well as two lazy beagles. I think I could handle lazy beagles, if that means they are quite as well. lol

Take it away, Joselyn.

In our area, the newscasters get giddy at the chance of an approaching storm. Not that storms are unusual, winter or summer, but they are really unpredictable. A storm could approach for several days, but the meteorologists and the computer models won’t agree on a path or snowfall amount until a day or two after the storm passed. And generally if it’s Monday and they’re predicting a blizzard for Saturday, we will only get flurries.

So when the weather reports started hinting at inches of snow for January 2, our wedding day, I pretty much ignored them. We’d likely get enough snow to cover the ground and make for some pretty winter wonderland pictures.

On Christmas, we had just that. About four inches of snow on the ground and everything looked lovely. New Year’s Day, the day of our rehearsal, was beautiful. Clear blue skies, bright sun glistening and sparkling on the snow. Perfect.

On Saturday morning, I awoke to the wind howling. I peeked out my window and saw white. Not the white ground of the field, but a wall of snow flying horizontally past. The bitter cold leaked through the windowpanes.

As I ate breakfast, calls started coming it. Family and friends that couldn’t make it. They were snowed in. It crossed my mind to delay the wedding, but several of my husband’s family and friends had driven all the way from Minnesota and could not just come back next weekend. Besides, for them, this wasn’t bad at all. Throw in a thirty below wind-chill and a foot of snow an hour coupled with an inch of ice and they might talk about the weather getting bad. In fact, my in-laws were hanging Christmas lights outside the reception hall. (My husband’s idea, not mine! They can blame him for the frost-bite.)

My family and I proceeded to the church and got two calls that could be problems. The first was from one of my bridesmaids. She couldn’t make it. Her father had been out that morning and gotten his truck stuck. He didn’t want her venturing out. Since I’d rather have her safely at home than stuck in a ditch or worse, we agreed it would be best if she stayed home. I wasn’t concerned about having a lopsided wedding party. Much worse things could happen at a wedding, but my sister immediately tracked down my cousin-to-be to fill in. The bridesmaid dress fit her perfectly.

The second call was a little more problematic. It was the minister. He’d gotten stuck in his driveway and couldn’t get out. No minister? That would put a hitch in the wedding plans. (This was the days before you could become a wedding officiator by filling out a form on the Internet. Neither my mother nor I would have been happy with that anyway.) So what were we to do?

My dad picked up the phone and started making calls. The good thing about a blizzard is that most people are tucked in at home planning to watch college football bowl games and not out shopping or whatever you would do the day after New Year’s. My dad called in a favor from a minister who lived across the street from the church and we were able to have the ceremony on time even.

All my brothers and sisters arrived safely and my husband’s family as well. Even my ninety-six year old grandmother made it. (She would have walked if my uncles hadn’t consented to take her.) We had all the important stuff.

We said our vows as the snow piled up outside. The minister even remembered our names after joking that he might refer to me as my niece’s name because she was friends with his daughter.

In the wedding pictures, you can see the guests were prepared for the wintry weather. No pretty dresses or high heels. Boots, slacks and wool sweaters were common. The parking lot showed similar preparation. Excluding our Honda Civic, it was filled with four wheel drives.

Even with all this the wedding was perfect. We were married with our friends and family around us. That was all that we needed.

And everyone remembers it. If they don’t remember our wedding, they'll remember the storm. It snowed almost continually for the next week. One of my bridesmaids had to delay her flight home. Whenever the meteorologists need to rank a storm, ‘our blizzard’ tops the list and I have to laugh.

I wish I could say we escaped the cold for our honeymoon, but we went to Minnesota and twenty-below wind-chill. What were we thinking?


Joselyn Vaughn
http://joselynvaughn.com/

Courting Sparks - Avalon Books - available for pre-order in Hardback at Amazon