Posts by Jonah

Well, the first phase of our honeymoon has come to a close. We cleaned up Coco Beach House this morning and hauled all our stuff back to Mobile (stopping along the way to help Dad deliver a washer and dryer to one of my church’s refugee families). It was so nice to spend a couple of weeks on the beach, just the two of us… in a way-too-huge house. We watched lots of DVD’s on a player Dad bought at Winn-Dixie for $34, took walks on the beach, collected sea shells with holes in them and strung them together, flew my brother-in-law Nathan’s four-string stunt kite, baked lots of bread, took baths in the over-sized masterbath tub, and generally had a wonderful, relaxed, lovely time.

Next, we replace the water pump in the Miata, celebrate my brother’s 22nd birthday, and then head west.

I’m trying to get used to this ring on my finger. I keep thinking it’s a band-aid, that I should avoid getting it wet. Berck keeps tapping his against the steering wheel, this foreign, hard body, looking out of place among his thick fingers. The only thing weirder is looking down at my own hand and seeing one similar to his, a sign that we must come as a matching set now. Otherwise, we could simply be in the car, on another road-tripping adventure.

It hasn’t quite sunk in that we’re married now. We’ve wanted to be with each other for so long… we HAVE been with each other for so long… and now it’s official, and we’ll never have to say goodbye again.

I still can’t decide if the ceremony was worth all the headache that went into it. It was certainly worth the effort, just not the dealing with all the parties involved who seemed to keep getting their feelings hurt at every turn.

I woke up in the middle of our wedding night, my new husband stretched out peacefully in the king beside me. I couldn’t go back to sleep–I’d drifted off around 8:30 the evening before, I was so exhausted–but I didn’t really want to slip back into unconsciousness. I lay there, grinning in the dark, pondering all the previous day’s events, replaying everything that happened, and letting the realization sink in of how wonderful it all was.

I was never one of those girls who had been planning her wedding since the first day she realized people have them. I didn’t even want to get married until Berck talked me into it. The only clear idea I had about a ceremony is that I wanted it outside. When our mothers independently suggested beach weddings to us within a week of each other, that was the thing to do. The details just seemed to fall into place. (By falling into place, I mean my mom asking me if I wanted such and such and me saying, goodness no! until I had to come up with something I did like.)

But what we ended up with was beautiful. It was everything I didn’t know I’d always wanted.

I wonder how many memories I can jot down before they’re confined to the myriad of time-slices captured by every amateur digital photographer in attendance… the effort I put into keeping my teeth from chattering as the wind bit through the velvet of my dress, the surprising sharpness of the wine as I gulped more than my half of it, the way Berck held my fingers as he swore something neither one of us could recall the words to later on…

Afterward, when we finally had some time to our own, we looked at each other and laughed and asked ourselves what had we done. We’d thought about this decision long and hard, right? We’d made up our minds a long time ago, yeah? We’d had time to think this over before the planning just got crazy and our time was no longer our own… didn’t we?

We snuck out after most everyone had left. As we checked into the Courtyard Marriott in our wedding gear, the clerk grinned and asked us how the wedding was.

“It was perfect,” I said.

They said it couldn’t be done.

But there are six layers of Duncan Hines Moist White stacked in the freezer.

Using borrowed pans, I baked three layers last night and four layers tonight. The additional layer was to take the place of the cake our yellow Lab Belle helped herself to last night. Bad dog. Very bad dog.

Berck and I went down the courthouse today and got our marriage license. It cost $43.50 (plus change for the parking meter). We had to call Mom and find out how she spells her middle name. The lady handed us the license and said, “Congratulations and be happy.”

It’s two weeks from today. I can’t decide to call the whole thing off or make a run for Vegas. Weddings are way too complicated. My sister had some words of wisdom back when this whole process began, though she had just found out she was pregnant, so she might not have said this (especially in front of our mother) otherwise:

“Remember, weddings are like funerals. They’re not for you; they’re for the people who love you.”

Right now all the people who love me are driving me crazy. Or is it the liquid Satan (in the form of bc) that my body is trying to get used to for the first time?

Mom and Dad took off for the beach house today…get some use out of it before it gets used for real. They ran around this evening trying to gather together everything they could think of to take down to Ft. Morgan for the wedding, I guess so we’ll have plenty of room in the trunk for other things later. I sat at the coffee table watching CNN repeating the same story about the capture of Saddam and addressing announcement envelopes…may as well get those out of the way. The parental units were running around madly, collecting things, paying bills (?), and generally driving each other (and me) insane. It was quite a relief to have them gone at last. Now I can have three peaceful days. The trick will be to not answer the phone.

There has been an ongoing saga involving the rehearsal dinner. Initially, there wasn’t going to be one, which was really quite fine with me. Now there is, but people on both sides of the aisle seem to have definite opinions about this shindig, and they have to have someone through whom to communicate these convictions. Guess who that person is. Yup.

I’m thinking Montana. By myself. I’ll write a book: How to Not Get Married. Or I’ll plant potatoes.

This was going to be a simple, small affair. It was also supposed to be fun. I feel like a pregnant woman in the midst of labor, screaming at my man, “You did this to me! This is your fault!” He is, after all, the one who wanted a wedding.

Can’t I just go away and come back in time for the ceremony?