Will's Wedding Tribute

                                                 Worth the Wait

      I have often told people that if I’d know we were predicting his character when we named our oldest son, we would not have named him Will. A child named Les might have been easier to live with. We named him Will in honor of Reed’s middle name—William, and my dad’s name—Willard, and Will fit him well, although it might have been a better middle name with “Strong” for the first name. It’s not that Will was rebellious, but that he headed his own way and it was not necessarily where the rest of us were going. He proved the adage, “Where there’s a Will, there’s a way.” I was confident that I could out-stubborn him. I had, after all, decades of practice, but I was afraid that someday he would head his own way and just keep walking.

     Will did surprisingly well in school for someone who claimed to have no recollection of what happened there when I asked, “How was school today?” With his love of the hunting and hiking, I thought Will might become an outfitter, but his senior year Will earned a scholarship to DeVry College in Seattle and set out to become an engineer. When we looked in the rear view mirror as we left him there and saw our backwoods boy alone in the big city, we should have known it was a poor fit. After one semester of marking his time as if he was serving a prison sentence, Will came home to the people and place he loved. After a semester at the community college, Will moved in with Josh saying it was bad enough to be a 20 year old drop out, without adding the phrase “who still lives at home”. Will, Josh and Mitch had experiences in the outdoors so interesting that I was surprised anybody was willing to go camping with them. Some of these adventures provided Will with opportunities to practice medicine long before he thought about becoming a nurse.

     Will did not date in high school, none of our children did, but I knew it would take an exceptional woman to love Will. Will has a quick mind, an even quicker tongue and an extremely dry sense of humor. His requirements for a girlfriend were that she love hiking, fishing and hunting, but she also had to be “hot”. At 26, Will headed to Helena for nursing school and into his life came Emily. She proved herself to be the woman Will was looking for, the companion he didn’t even know he needed, and will, in the years to come, become so one with himself he will not remember how he got by without her.

      Even on your most willful days, I knew we were investing in someone of infinite value and potential. Today, with the addition of Emily to our family, we are doubling that investment. What began with parenting, ended as friendship. You were well worth the wait.