Anniversary: Collect wedding stories

1 April 2009 by Libbi.

It’s our wedding anniversary. Yep. April 1.

When we got engaged, my mother said not to consider planning a wedding while my father’s mother was still living in their house. She had become an invalid after a stroke and needed constant care, and got that care from my mother.

So. I had to get married over my grandmother’s dead body. In a sense.

When GrandPowell died in November 1977, the Mother of the Bride  then put forth more conditions: No weddings in the holiday season (she had been Mother of the Groom at Thanksgiving and Christmas for my brothers’ weddings a few years before). Not in January or February either, the weather would be too bad. And of course, no weddings in Lent.

“All right, Mother,” I said over the phone to her from my tiny apartment in Shelbyville, KY. “Book the church for the first Saturday after Easter 1978. If the church is not available, book Monte Sano State Park. I WILL get married this spring!”

And thus, on April 1, 1978, we were wed at the Church of the Nativity, in Huntsville, Alabama, where I had been baptised and confirmed.

This Mother’s Day, consider gathering the wedding stories of your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. How was the proposal made, and where? How was the date chosen?  The site? The wedding party? This is all good stuff to know!

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