Chris and I flew out and spent our first married Christmas visiting family and friends in Minnesota and Wisconsin, many of whom were unable to make it to the wedding. We planned our itinerary carefully, packing each day full of people and plans. It was a targeted four-day trip that went as smoothly as anyone could have hoped.
We spent an afternoon with one of my dear friends from middle and high school, chatting with her and her husband and playing with her adorable kids.
We caught up with some of our oldest family friends and marveled over how long we’ve all known and loved each other.
We laughed with aunts and uncles, met cousins’ significant others for the first time, and shared great food and stories. It was perfect.
On our last night there, as we were decompressing after Christmas dinner with my dad and his girlfriend, Chris looked up from his phone. “Our flight was cancelled.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
I had spent our entire visit very cockily relaying to our hosts how, despite the two-foot dump they’d experienced, we’d only received a light coating of snow one night that was gone the following morning. So, people of New York, I take full responsibility for the storm that shut down the city and left us stuck in Minneapolis for an additional four days. Karma’s sort of a bitch like that.
Fortunately, we were stuck in a metropolitan area, which gave us something to explore in between Chris working remotely and me shopping for underwear to get us through our extended stay. As it turns out, Minneapolis and St. Paul offer some great gluten-free options, which I thought I’d share in case you ever find yourself stranded in enjoying the Twin Cities area.
On a cloudless, sixty-degree November day filled with golden light, I married the man that has been my partner and best friend for the past four years. We wed on an historic farm with rust-colored chickens roaming free and the last red and yellow leaves of autumn still clinging to the trees.
Only our closest friends and family attended, less than fifty people in all. The ceremony was intimate and emotional, performed by my brother. We wrote our own vows.
The rest of the evening was spent enjoying hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, a four-course menu straight from the farm with wine pairings, and fabulous cake from our favorite gluten-free bakery.
We worked very hard to ensure that the whole event, down to the smallest detail, was representative of us. We wanted to honor who we each are and the relationship that we have together, and we wanted to share those things in a very special way with the people who mean the most to us.
And I feel that we did just that.
Our guests, however, made the evening truly remarkable. We filled that room with the best people we know, people from many different parts of our life, wonderful individually for a myriad of reasons. It was amazing to see them all together, eating and talking and laughing with open hearts. The love that night was like a fluid presence, flowing through everyone and carrying the mood. Every look held a depth of knowing, every touch lingered, each embrace was genuine and firm.
At the end of the night, when it was just the two of us, we marveled at how honestly good the people in our life are and how beautiful the celebration was. The whole day was more than either of us could have hoped for, and, after a year of planning, it was extremely satisfying.
It feels good to be married. Grounding. Stabilizing. Like everything from here on out is life.
I said yes. And then I said no. Then I said yes again. And I recently said yes once more. For the last time.
To a different dress.
I know things were seeming pretty okay when where we left off. I was feeling good about the dress. Fine, if you will. Since my last post, however, I’ve had a few more (I’m not going to sugar-coat this) meltdowns, all related to the dress in some capacity. I kept trying to make it work somehow, though, attempting to construct a “look” to compensate for my lack of enthusiasm.
My makeup should be dramatic. I need statement jewelry to make the it pop! Maybe a rubber cincher would take a few inches off my waist and give me back the hourglass figure that I thought I had but seems to disappear in the dress?
The problem is: none of these things are me. It began stressing me out. Big time.
This being the case, since the fitting, my mom received more than a couple of tearful calls from me expressing my concerns that I won’t look or feel beautiful on my wedding day. She kept nudging me to go out and see what other shops had to offer. I couldn’t. I felt trapped. The dress was already bought and paid for, and with around six weeks to the wedding I knew how limited my options would be. I didn’t want to go slogging through samples only to come up exhausted and even more disappointed. I was resigned to being fine with my dress. It’s fine. It’ll be fine.
But, really, who wants their wedding dress to be fine?
I’ve never been the type of girl that dreamed of her wedding, planning out each and every detail, from the time she was five years old. I was more the type that looked forward to it…you know, if it ever happened. I didn’t know where I wanted it to happen, what kind of flowers I would carry, or what the dress would look like. I had my own life to live and if I found someone, great—if not, I had a standing agreement with a best friend to tie the knot at 40. There was only one time, almost ten years ago, when I was young and certain that he was the one and started to do some of that serious envisioning, but none of those details have held up over the years. I imagine if you put me in the kind of dress I had been picturing at sixteen today, I’d die at the ridiculousness of it.
When I met Chris almost four years ago, I knew right away that he was going to be my husband. We both knew. It was one of those unavoidable things in life where it was immediately clear that it couldn’t happen any other way. Like when you walk into your favorite restaurant, knowing what you’re going to order, because it’s what you always order. You could try something new. Sometimes you even look over the menu, trying to pick anything else because it seems so silly that you never do. But the universe won’t let you. That menu item has chosen you.
Apologies for the food analogy; I haven’t had breakfast yet.
So, we knew. But back then the only thing I was picturing about that day was us and the things we would say to each other. None of the details mattered. I just wanted to marry this man.
Two and a half years later, after a lot of waiting and far too many of those misinterpreted moments where something seems off and you think Could this be it? and then it’s not and you use every bit of your strength to hide your disappointment and the fact that you now feel completely lame for being such a female stereotype, I started doing some secret searching. I found dresses that I loved, and one that I even thought might be it. Of course, it’s a very different thing to see a dress on the internets than it is to see it in person, on your body—especially when your body is dissimilar to the waif-thin Spanish model that was wearing it when you first fell in love.
After we got engaged, that was my very first dress-shopping experience: crushing disappointment. I tried on a dozen heavily-constructed gowns, in European sample sizes, and nothing looked good. I didn’t know any different, though. I just assumed that all wedding dresses were built a certain way and that they didn’t look good on my body. I left determined to starve myself for the next 11 months. (Heh, yeahright.)
Shell-shocked, I waited several months, up until the point where it was imperative that I get my butt in gear, to look at dresses again. I had no idea what I wanted. I made appointments at a few stores, and, being in New York, it seemed I should at least stop by Kleinfeld’s.
Chris and I will be getting married in less than two months.
For a while, I was trying to publish a sort of “countdown” post each month. I thought it would be interesting to be able to look back and see how I felt as each month went by leading up to the wedding. The last time I posted one was at five, and I think that’s about right. Five…and then holy crap it’s less than two months away. It was unintentional, but I think I managed to accurately capture the feeling of these past three months.
I’m definitely feeling the crunch. There are still so many things to decide and finalize, and now that we’re down to the wire I’m starting to doubt some of the decisions I’ve already made. Is the dress really the dress? What about dahlias instead of calla lilies? Fondant or buttercream? Veil or no veil? Is Vegas still an option?
Having lived these past six years as a New Yorker, I've remembered and contemplated the tragedy that took place nine years ago more often than I ever knew I would. Less than a month after I moved here, I followed the beams of light that shine into the sky each year where the towers once stood from Washington Square Park all the way down to Ground Zero. I wasn't yet familiar enough with the city to really know where I was going, but I kept my eyes up and I walked. I remember very distinctly the feelings I had when I first saw the emptiness there. I remember picking up my phone and leaving weakly-spoken voicemails for my loved ones. I remember searching for my breath.
There's something so amazingly alive about this place. When something important is happening somewhere, you can almost feel it everywhere else. Even though I didn't know the city before, being inside and a part of it now, there's a real sense that a limb is missing from this beautiful concrete creature. Finally, it's been just long enough since that sometimes days or months will pass without feeling the immediacy of that loss, but every so often that phantom sensation comes creeping in.
Today is one of those days when we all feel it, when we all remember where we were and when we knew. Even the City takes a moment of pause. The Chrysler Building dims her lights, the Empire State Building beams red, white, and blue, and those two towering beacons gleam into the clouds.
This past weekend Chris and I took a trip. It was a trip filled with family and friends and so many kinds of true and honest love that it was overwhelming. When we returned on Sunday night, I felt that familiar sense of home that has been a part of me since I first moved to this city, but I’ve also been carrying with me a deep and unrelenting loneliness. Sometimes you forget how much certain people mean to you when you haven’t seen them for years. Sometimes you don’t realize how much time you could have made for someone until they move away.
Everything about today was gray and lingering feelings from a difficult night made all those longings even more intense. And then, when the day was almost gone, I looked up and saw this. I know there’s a reason why I’m here in this city. I’m not so sure I could ever really be anywhere else. But oh how there are times that I wish I could reach out, gather up all those people scattered to the west of me, and pull them here. I think every one of them would enjoy this view.
Things have been blurry around here lately. The weeks seem long, yet the hours are so full that the days speed right by. I haven’t been able to find the time, or the brainpower, to write. When I sit down to try, everything that comes out feels useless, like I’ve been futilely throwing precious minutes at flabby, flaccid prose. I finish each page and can’t find anything worth anything, and I abandon it.
Part of this problem is that my energies have been focused elsewhere. The wedding is now less than four months away, and each new task gives me greater understanding of why there is a whole profession dedicated to this process. I’ve lost entire days to research, reading, websites, and preparation, days that end with me feeling as empty and unproductive as I have been after all my hours of writing. I know that, really, progress is being made on each front, but it’s difficult to shake this feeling of wasted time.
I really hate to be one of those bloggers that blogs about not blogging, and yet, here I am. I have updates on the garden, some good, some bad. I have stories to tell, things to say. I have so many recipes to share that I’m beginning to feel mean for withholding them. It’s not that there’s nothing to write, it’s just that my brain won’t let me.
One could say I have issues. I like things to be in order, tidy, sequential. At times, my mind gets stuck on something that I want to say, am struggling to say, am having three separate Word documents worth of difficulty spitting out—but I can’t move on. The subject becomes like that old lady at the checkout counter, searching madly, insistently through her purse for a single twenty-five-cent coupon. There’s a whole queue of other ideas behind her, sighing loudly, craning over each other’s shoulders for a better look at what is holding everything up, and shouting, “Hey lady, I’ll give you a whole dollar if you just move!” But she knows that that coupon is somewhere in the cluttered depths of her bag, and as soon as—and only as soon as—she finds it, the next in line may have their turn. This is the twisted scenario happening inside my head as of late.
Combine that perfectionist nonsense with all the rest of the mess that is our days lately and it’s the perfect recipe for “What the hell happened to July?”
So I’m using this post as my own personal deus ex machina, my device to push this plot forward, to allow myself to move on from all the hopeless half-written posts cluttering my desktop and clogging my brain. This post is the young, handsome gentleman passing by that checkout line. He stops and moves toward the old woman, bending to grab something from the floor. “I believe you dropped this ma’am,” he says, handing her the coupon. She smiles. The whole line erupts in applause.
Letting out a long sigh of relief, the cashier hands the old woman her receipt. She looks up, ready. “Next!”
Growing up, I don’t think I ever once saw or knowingly ate a blackberry. In fact, I don’t think I really even knew what a blackberry looked like until last summer. This is not the fault of my parents or anything comparable to that tragic scene from Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. No, I just never knew what a blackberry was.
Chris and I will be getting married in less than five months.
And before we know it, it will only be four.
This is somewhat of a shame as I’m only just getting to that place where I almost never slip up and call him my boyfriend anymore. Fiancé is hard to get used to. It’s sort of a mouthful. It has certainly been fun to say, particularly to each other, but it’s an uncomfortable word, difficult to pronounce without seeming as though you’re calling attention or putting on airs.
This is not to say that I do not love having a fiancé. Or being a fiancée.
