We're Married Thirty-Two Years

Thirty-two years ago my husband and I were married in a county park. I wore a Gunne Sax prom dress and a sun hat from a local store that I trimmed with lace. I also made the wedding cake, which wasn't so hard to decorate, but was terrifying to transport to the reception in August heat and humidity. Our wedding didn't come close to resembling the affairs I'm invited to lately, or that I see on television on shows like Whose Wedding Is It, Anyway? But we had a good time and the marriage has lasted, so I don't regret not having a more elaborate shebang. At least we had a live dance band.

But the most amazing thing about our wedding had to do with photography, or lack of it. I hired a college friend to take casual pictures, and one of my sisters-in-law took home movies, the Super 8 variety. We didn't see the movies until twenty-five years later. The sister-in-law lived miles away, and eventually became sick with cancer. The movies were stashed in her basement, and after her death, years later, my husband's brother found them and passed them on to us. We didn't have a movie projector or a screen, so we had the films transferred to video tape (which I had tranferred to DVD disk this summer). On our twenty-fifth anniversary we watched a silent home movie of our wedding and reception. It was amazing and sad. There we were in our younger selves, and there were our parents, all gone now, dancing. It was like stepping back for a moment to a very happy day, with everyone there to share it with us. It was almost unbearable.

Anyway, we're off today for a couple days in a nice inn with an excellent restaurant. We'll bicycle, play some scrabble, read, drink some wine, and remember that happy day thirty-two years ago.