This was the last of the five-month wedding run. Mom came to Richmond on Thursday night, and we left early on Friday for the land of Grey's Anatomy and Starbucks. The wedding was in Port Gamble, a small town outside Seattle. On the way, we checked out (the gift shop of) the glass museum in Tacoma, and we might have seen a building made of shipping containers. We saw Molly and her family when we got to the hotel, then we got amazing pizzas from a local joint.
Let me take a break to tell you about Molly. Of those who are not related to me, I have known her and kept in touch with her longer than almost anyone. She didn't come to Henderson until she was in eighth grade and I was in ninth. She was my brother's age but was in some of my classes for math because her former school district had had a different math track, and because she's wicked smart. Then she was in the combined French 3/4 class with me, my brother, our friend Doug, and a very few others. We saw Elf together in the theater, and the first Harry Potter. Molly lives within walking distance, so when it snowed she would go with us to the elementary school with the good hills. Molly was studying in London while I was in France, so our moms came over one weekend and we all met in Paris. After college, I lived with her and her sweet dog for a few months. Molly is an awesome cook and a great encourager. It's so nice to go across the country to celebrate someone you've known for that long and enjoyed so much.
The wedding was in this tiny chapel in a slight drizzle. All the music was from the Harry Potter movies, most of it recognizable only to fans as diehard as Molly. The main color was dark purple. I knew all the bridesmaids. At the reception, we sat with some of Molly's coworkers, who told my mom they loved Molly and would take care of her.
The whole trip, Mom didn't stop telling me that all the trees were pointy. It was neat to be in an all-evergreen environment, and occasionally we would round a bend and encounter a majestic lake with mountains beyond it. I'm proud of Molly for embracing a new place and a new family, creating a life that suits her to a T, and always being true to herself and those who love her.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Wedding Report #4: Lindsey & Jeremy
This wedding was a long time ago. September 10. I started the fall semester two days later, and blogging hasn't been a priority since then, but I've felt that absence, so here goes.
Lindsey and Jeremy got married at Landfall, the ritzy country club in Wilmington. I left Richmond early in the morning and rolled in just in time for a luncheon at Elijah's on the waterfront. It was awesome to see Stacey and Lyndsay and Lindsey and to get to know the other bridesmaids I'd heard so much about. I remembered other meals I'd had there, the one where Sims called randomly in the middle of it just to see how I was, the one where Katie walked across the restaurant to fix the blinds for me because the sun was in my eyes, the dinner we had to say goodbye to the same Katie but she didn't even make it and I was bummed.
After a happy girly lunch, Stacey and Lyndsay and I met up with Stacey's husband Bobby and got ice cream at Kilwin's and took pictures at the river in our dresses and, well, I wouldn't even say we caught up because these are people with whom you pick up where you left off, no big whoop. Lyndsay is in Colorado, and she says it finally feels like a real life. Stacey is in a tiny not-even-town in North Carolina, Bobby working in his parents' store and Stacey home with baby Jonah. Best mental image of the trip: Bobby worked at Starbucks before they moved. Every employee gets a free pound of coffee or container of tea or whatever each week, and before they moved, everyone at the store gave Bobby their freebies, so their pantry out there in nowheresville is filled with options for coffee and tea and cocoa and any such thing they could want.
The rehearsal involved mostly walking up and down the aisle, and then for the rehearsal dinner we went to the Pilot House, right next door to where we had lunch. I saw not one but two videos of babies dancing, and the mosquitos came out something fierce but someone had bug spray to share.
I got back to Jeff and Brinley's and watched The Soup and talked with Brinley for a bit before sleeping in their guest room, which has a remote-control fan. On Saturday morning, I woke to the sound of Brinley using her KitchenAid; she was working on concord-grape-and-rosemary focaccia. It was incredible. Jeff was out surfing. Brinley had made granola bars earlier (which I've been making ever since), and she broke one up and served it to me with vanilla yogurt and strawberries. Amy and Eric came over and hung out. The best thing about seeing old friends (OK, I know I'd only been away for two months, but a lot had happened in that time) is the ease of it, like you never left. It felt like I just happened to be over at Jeff and Brinley's that morning.
I got to Landfall in time to hang out for a little bit with Lindsey and the girls before we took our places. Everything was beautiful and sweet, and when they knelt for communion with their backs to us, we could see the bottom of Jeremy's shoes which said "Lucky" on the left and "Me" on the right.
At dinner, I sat with Elizabeth and Lindsay (yes, we are overrun with Lindsay/Lindsey/Lyndsay in that group, but at least they have different spellings), and again it was like old times, giggling about boys and getting excited about Elizabeth's applications to law school and feeding off each other's sweetness and care. The cake was the best wedding cake I've had, the speeches were precious and touching, the dancing was wild, and the whole thing made me see, on the fourth time, why it is that weddings are so great.
It's so not about lovey-dovey romantic mess, like I must have thought it was. Weddings celebrate love in general, and every type of love is present there. You have people who watched the bride and groom grow up, little kids who look up to them, new friends, old friends, neighbors, coworkers, every type of family, church friends, school friends, those who babysat for them and those whom they have babysat. I saw that very clearly at the Moore wedding, not that I didn't at the others. I saw how much Lindsey's coworkers love her. I saw how much her parents love her. Jeremy, great as he is, he's just icing, and that's as it should be.
I stayed with Megan, who was wearing almost exactly the dress I had thought about wearing, and slept hard and woke up and had salted caramel something at Starbucks because they were out of pumpkin spice and went to Pine Valley United Methodist for their 50th anniversary service and lunch, and I looked at what they were putting in the time capsule and hugged all the youth and ate a pot-luck lunch and listened to how all the couples at my table met.
Then I went to the Guppies' house. Baby Jack was asleep, and I had a good visit with Chris and Brian. When it was time to leave, I had to think hard of how much I loved seminary, which I really did and still do, but man, was it hard to tear myself away.
Thank you, Jeremy and Lindsey and everyone involved in the wedding, Jeff and Brinley and everyone from Pine Valley, Chris and Brian and everyone else I got to see in Wilmington, thank you, thank you, thank you Wilmington itself for drawing all these fine people, for being the place where we met and lived and shared and grew, for being the place where I finally started to get it.
Lindsey and Jeremy got married at Landfall, the ritzy country club in Wilmington. I left Richmond early in the morning and rolled in just in time for a luncheon at Elijah's on the waterfront. It was awesome to see Stacey and Lyndsay and Lindsey and to get to know the other bridesmaids I'd heard so much about. I remembered other meals I'd had there, the one where Sims called randomly in the middle of it just to see how I was, the one where Katie walked across the restaurant to fix the blinds for me because the sun was in my eyes, the dinner we had to say goodbye to the same Katie but she didn't even make it and I was bummed.
After a happy girly lunch, Stacey and Lyndsay and I met up with Stacey's husband Bobby and got ice cream at Kilwin's and took pictures at the river in our dresses and, well, I wouldn't even say we caught up because these are people with whom you pick up where you left off, no big whoop. Lyndsay is in Colorado, and she says it finally feels like a real life. Stacey is in a tiny not-even-town in North Carolina, Bobby working in his parents' store and Stacey home with baby Jonah. Best mental image of the trip: Bobby worked at Starbucks before they moved. Every employee gets a free pound of coffee or container of tea or whatever each week, and before they moved, everyone at the store gave Bobby their freebies, so their pantry out there in nowheresville is filled with options for coffee and tea and cocoa and any such thing they could want.
The rehearsal involved mostly walking up and down the aisle, and then for the rehearsal dinner we went to the Pilot House, right next door to where we had lunch. I saw not one but two videos of babies dancing, and the mosquitos came out something fierce but someone had bug spray to share.
I got back to Jeff and Brinley's and watched The Soup and talked with Brinley for a bit before sleeping in their guest room, which has a remote-control fan. On Saturday morning, I woke to the sound of Brinley using her KitchenAid; she was working on concord-grape-and-rosemary focaccia. It was incredible. Jeff was out surfing. Brinley had made granola bars earlier (which I've been making ever since), and she broke one up and served it to me with vanilla yogurt and strawberries. Amy and Eric came over and hung out. The best thing about seeing old friends (OK, I know I'd only been away for two months, but a lot had happened in that time) is the ease of it, like you never left. It felt like I just happened to be over at Jeff and Brinley's that morning.
I got to Landfall in time to hang out for a little bit with Lindsey and the girls before we took our places. Everything was beautiful and sweet, and when they knelt for communion with their backs to us, we could see the bottom of Jeremy's shoes which said "Lucky" on the left and "Me" on the right.
At dinner, I sat with Elizabeth and Lindsay (yes, we are overrun with Lindsay/Lindsey/Lyndsay in that group, but at least they have different spellings), and again it was like old times, giggling about boys and getting excited about Elizabeth's applications to law school and feeding off each other's sweetness and care. The cake was the best wedding cake I've had, the speeches were precious and touching, the dancing was wild, and the whole thing made me see, on the fourth time, why it is that weddings are so great.
It's so not about lovey-dovey romantic mess, like I must have thought it was. Weddings celebrate love in general, and every type of love is present there. You have people who watched the bride and groom grow up, little kids who look up to them, new friends, old friends, neighbors, coworkers, every type of family, church friends, school friends, those who babysat for them and those whom they have babysat. I saw that very clearly at the Moore wedding, not that I didn't at the others. I saw how much Lindsey's coworkers love her. I saw how much her parents love her. Jeremy, great as he is, he's just icing, and that's as it should be.
I stayed with Megan, who was wearing almost exactly the dress I had thought about wearing, and slept hard and woke up and had salted caramel something at Starbucks because they were out of pumpkin spice and went to Pine Valley United Methodist for their 50th anniversary service and lunch, and I looked at what they were putting in the time capsule and hugged all the youth and ate a pot-luck lunch and listened to how all the couples at my table met.
Then I went to the Guppies' house. Baby Jack was asleep, and I had a good visit with Chris and Brian. When it was time to leave, I had to think hard of how much I loved seminary, which I really did and still do, but man, was it hard to tear myself away.
Thank you, Jeremy and Lindsey and everyone involved in the wedding, Jeff and Brinley and everyone from Pine Valley, Chris and Brian and everyone else I got to see in Wilmington, thank you, thank you, thank you Wilmington itself for drawing all these fine people, for being the place where we met and lived and shared and grew, for being the place where I finally started to get it.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
New Development
I highly recommend that you check out the new online journal The Polycultural, created by some friends of mine from Wilmington. Poke around and see how you like it! One of your favorite bloggers has a post in there. Enjoy.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Moving Right Along
Presenting the last couple weeks in scenes:
1) Enjoying the hurricane in Mike's apartment, listening to him and Howard and Thomas play the best of our early adolescence, candlelight reflecting off beer bottles because we'd turned the lights out the better to see the storm. Also a girls-vs.-guys game of something like charades.
2) Eating pizza at Mom and Dad's house with old friends we usually see only at holidays, followed by peaches with granola and whipped cream.
3) The dazzling progressive-dinner parade-of-love quality of my morning in Davidson and evening in Charlotte. So many delightful people in one day! Rob Spach! Anne Wills! Daniel Ervin! Mike and Katie Foote! That's my kind of company. The best part was the effortlessness of reconnecting after various amounts of time apart, facilitated by Box Turtle Mocha at Summit Coffee, quiche and hamburger, pizza and beer, and the deep goodness of the people involved. In between, reading free New York Timeses, a Davidson institution.
4) That first breathtaking glimpse of Blue Ridge through the trees, and the instant familiarity of Blowing Rock even after years away.
5) Mast General Store full of cozy socks (and I don't even like socks!), scarves, fleece, and other layers of goodness making me so ready for fall.
1) Enjoying the hurricane in Mike's apartment, listening to him and Howard and Thomas play the best of our early adolescence, candlelight reflecting off beer bottles because we'd turned the lights out the better to see the storm. Also a girls-vs.-guys game of something like charades.
2) Eating pizza at Mom and Dad's house with old friends we usually see only at holidays, followed by peaches with granola and whipped cream.
3) The dazzling progressive-dinner parade-of-love quality of my morning in Davidson and evening in Charlotte. So many delightful people in one day! Rob Spach! Anne Wills! Daniel Ervin! Mike and Katie Foote! That's my kind of company. The best part was the effortlessness of reconnecting after various amounts of time apart, facilitated by Box Turtle Mocha at Summit Coffee, quiche and hamburger, pizza and beer, and the deep goodness of the people involved. In between, reading free New York Timeses, a Davidson institution.
4) That first breathtaking glimpse of Blue Ridge through the trees, and the instant familiarity of Blowing Rock even after years away.
5) Mast General Store full of cozy socks (and I don't even like socks!), scarves, fleece, and other layers of goodness making me so ready for fall.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Wedding Report #3: Chrissy & Ryan
I was only out of town for about 24 hours this time, and my trip included a few minutes in West Virginia and going through mountain tunnels. The mother of the bride works with my mom, so I grew up knowing Chrissy and her twin sister, Kala, who are a year younger than me. The wedding was on their family farm at the house that Button (Chrissy & Kala's mom) built. My mom and her friends had gone a few months (years?) ago to help build the stone wall behind where they said their vows.
Mom's friends and I drank beers on the back row while the wedding went on. Kala gave Chrissy away. There was Everclear-spiked lemonade, and s'mores instead of wedding cake, and the baked potatos and the zucchini in the zucchini bread/bars came from just a few feet from where it was served in the field. The music was good, the groomsmen and groomswomen were really well coordinated with the bridesmaids, and the entire wedding party recited quotes from movies about love. The weather was very comfortable, even chilly toward the end. The whole thing was great, and everyone was happy, and love is grand. Thanks, Chrissy and Ryan, for the invitation; Button and Wendy for the hospitality; and everyone for the fun.
Mom's friends and I drank beers on the back row while the wedding went on. Kala gave Chrissy away. There was Everclear-spiked lemonade, and s'mores instead of wedding cake, and the baked potatos and the zucchini in the zucchini bread/bars came from just a few feet from where it was served in the field. The music was good, the groomsmen and groomswomen were really well coordinated with the bridesmaids, and the entire wedding party recited quotes from movies about love. The weather was very comfortable, even chilly toward the end. The whole thing was great, and everyone was happy, and love is grand. Thanks, Chrissy and Ryan, for the invitation; Button and Wendy for the hospitality; and everyone for the fun.
Friday, August 19, 2011
And the Circle Goes Round and Round
I took my Hebrew final this morning. That means summer language school is over. That means almost everyone is going away for at least a week, and when we're all back for the fall, things will be different. There will be a lot more people that we don't know. We'll have more to do and less time to hang out. I don't feel great about this. Things are almost perfect now--better than ever--and change is not so hot when I like the way things are.
But I remember feeling basically this way when I realized I had to leave Wilmington. I had to stop and catch my breath when I thought about leaving my friends there and starting over. But look how it turned out! So I keep this in mind: change doesn't mean breaking a spell of awesomeness. It means a chance for life to get even better. Summer language, glorious though it is, is not an end in itself. It's just the beginning. As the Snakes on a Plane theme song says, "oh, I'm ready for it. C'mon, bring it."
Our class wrote a song for our professor to the tune of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." We weren't ready when he came in, so we asked him to go away and come back. As I'd predicted, the song made him cry. A fitting end to a beautiful time together.
But I remember feeling basically this way when I realized I had to leave Wilmington. I had to stop and catch my breath when I thought about leaving my friends there and starting over. But look how it turned out! So I keep this in mind: change doesn't mean breaking a spell of awesomeness. It means a chance for life to get even better. Summer language, glorious though it is, is not an end in itself. It's just the beginning. As the Snakes on a Plane theme song says, "oh, I'm ready for it. C'mon, bring it."
Our class wrote a song for our professor to the tune of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." We weren't ready when he came in, so we asked him to go away and come back. As I'd predicted, the song made him cry. A fitting end to a beautiful time together.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
A Surprise
I was just looking back through old blog posts because I'm narcissistic and don't want to study, and when I read references to Beulaville and Richlands, I actually felt nostalgic for them! Those are the towns I covered for work. This is a surprise because a) it feels SOOOOOOO much longer ago than it is. It's only been 2 months since my last day of work. And b) I kind of suspected I might love those towns but never thought it would manifest so clearly as affection so soon. Working there was grueling in certain ways, and I thought the preciousness of the people would take at least a year to overcome that in my memory. I did kinda have my eye on churches around there once I started thinkin' seminary. If I had me a hubby or some kind of friend posse, living in one of those places could be possibly maybe one day in some sense pretty sweet. This is coming from the person who foams at the mouth when New York is mentioned. Sometimes I think I should get excited about fewer things, for instance, come on, woman! Small towns or big cities, which is it? You can't love both! But then I'm like, watch me.
Speaking of friend posses, just so you know, I know exactly what I would do if I won the lottery: first, invest in a safe but relatively high-interest something while I plan. (Thanks, Mom and Dad, for teaching me right!) Then, buy a bunch of land and build sweet buildings on it, and then invite everyone I love to come and live there indefinitely. I just now thought it could also involve traveling together, hence the term "posse." Also we would go see The Book of Mormon, like, right now, because I'd suddenly be able to make that happen.
One time we were talking in Sunday School about paradise, and I think some people had it confused with "island paradise," because they kept referencing beaches and fruity drinks. But I said paradise is having everyone together. Being an adult these days means having different sets of friends; at the very least, people from childhood and people from now. At the most, those plus college friends plus work friends plus church friends plus grad school friends plus neighbors plus your kids' friends' parents plus your parents' friends' kids plus God knows who else. Hello. This usually comes in handy and keeps things stimulating, but sometimes it hurts when I realize that set A won't get much chance to meet set B even though they would loooove each other. Hence my master plan for lotto time. Everyone together. Good food, music, bonfires and s'mores every night in the summer, hot chocolate when it's cold, bike rides, art time, books, and pets. Just enjoying each other's company, breathing it in, and laughing and crying until we can't remember which we were doing first.
Speaking of friend posses, just so you know, I know exactly what I would do if I won the lottery: first, invest in a safe but relatively high-interest something while I plan. (Thanks, Mom and Dad, for teaching me right!) Then, buy a bunch of land and build sweet buildings on it, and then invite everyone I love to come and live there indefinitely. I just now thought it could also involve traveling together, hence the term "posse." Also we would go see The Book of Mormon, like, right now, because I'd suddenly be able to make that happen.
One time we were talking in Sunday School about paradise, and I think some people had it confused with "island paradise," because they kept referencing beaches and fruity drinks. But I said paradise is having everyone together. Being an adult these days means having different sets of friends; at the very least, people from childhood and people from now. At the most, those plus college friends plus work friends plus church friends plus grad school friends plus neighbors plus your kids' friends' parents plus your parents' friends' kids plus God knows who else. Hello. This usually comes in handy and keeps things stimulating, but sometimes it hurts when I realize that set A won't get much chance to meet set B even though they would loooove each other. Hence my master plan for lotto time. Everyone together. Good food, music, bonfires and s'mores every night in the summer, hot chocolate when it's cold, bike rides, art time, books, and pets. Just enjoying each other's company, breathing it in, and laughing and crying until we can't remember which we were doing first.
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