Dream Wedding

    I was not one of those little girls who had her dream wedding all planned out, just waiting to insert a groom.  I did not expect to be noticed, much less loved, by a man.  And I didn't even realize the loneliness that left inside me until I went away to college. It was the first time I thought there could be more to my life than living at home, smoothing the turmoil that accompanied my mother's mental illness. For that same reason, I did not have a good pattern for how marriage should be.  I only knew that I liked the way Grandma and Grandpa, after having spent the whole day together, could still be heard talking in their bedroom at night.
     But I knew one thing, if I ever did marry, it would be for life. And I would not settle for being one of those couples that stay together out of habit, like roommates, and not out of love. I wanted to be in love for the rest of my life. Because I am a Christian, being married was important to me, the wedding ceremony was not.  I bought a $78 wedding dress in the bridal shop at the mall.  The high waisted, tiered style then popular did not need fitting and it wouldn't have occurred to me have done so anyway.  Reed wore a rented tux and mismatched socks. My sole maid of honor wore a long dress she already had.  The best man wore a tux he had bought as a groomsman in a previous wedding.  I chose daisies for my flowers because Mom said she had a yellow dress she wanted to wear. We exchanged our vows at 10 in the morning in a 10 minute ceremony in a meadow.
      Our wedding was memorable to many attendees, however, because of the ensuing accidents.  The pastor of the church where the reception was held, didn't make it to the ceremony because on the drive to the meadow, a trailer carrying a stock car broke free and crushed the front of the pastor's car.  The friends doing photography didn't make it to the reception because they ran off the gravel road and into a tree, totaling their car and, to a lesser degree, them.  At the reception for those who survived the wedding, the pastor who performed the service stepped back to look up when he heard a cracking sound in the tree overhead and just missed getting hit by the falling branch.  If we had been of the signs and wonders persuasion, those signs certainly would have made us wonder.
     Today we have been married for 35 years.  We are still in love, but not the same love, for love changes and deepens through the years. His love for me was not the kind that battered down the door to my heart, it was the kind that kept patiently knocking until I was ready to let it in. Being in love forever--that was the dream that mattered.