SOS - Happy Anniversary

Today is my 12th wedding anniversary so this Sunday Soap Opera is in honor of our day. Please visit Brillig and Walking Kateastrophe's for other Soap Operas.

Twelve years ago today the sun was bright all day and the sky was clear. Amazing Guy and my wedding went off without a hitch. Really. My wedding itself was not a Soap Opera at all. My biggest concern was that the flower girl would pick her nose at the front of the church during the service. Fortunately my aunt had brought up with her from Atlanta fancy white gloves for the 4-year-old. The entire time she was in the front of the church she admired her hands in her gloves.

Several years earlier I had left New Orleans to return to my hometown to attend graduate school. Amazing Guy was staying behind to finish his graduate degree. He had given me the promise ring after only four month of dating to declare he would wait for me.

The summer before graduate school started I found myself with the most amazing, wonderful opportunity. A college buddy was having an all-expense trip to Italy paid for by her mom. However, her mom wanted her to have a traveling companion. Since I had spent my junior year of college in Florence, I was asked to go and all I had to pay was the airfare. So not only was I getting to spend 4 weeks in Italy with a smart and funny friend but I was getting to spend 4 weeks in plush, fancy hotels because the friend and her mom had excellent tastes. At the time my idea of extravagance was a youth hostel with hot showers. Her idea of roughing it was a hotel with 3 stars or less.

So I went down to New York City a few days before the flight to Italy to hang out with another friend. Leslie (not her real name) was (and still is) one of those girlfriends everyone should have. Fun, generous, smart and very understanding when you don't talk for, oh, a year.

Here I am, in NYC with a terrific friend, about to go to Italy for a month with another terrific friend, and I am blue. Blue. Blue. Blue.

Why?

Because I missed Amazing Guy. A lot.

So what does Leslie suggest? "Let's go try on wedding dresses!"

I think she knew that Amazing Guy was the one I would marry. So what that we would be apart for a year and a half? Let's start thinking wedding now.

I agreed. We walked into Laura Ashley and climbed to the third floor where the wedding dresses were kept. We brought a few to the changing room and I tried them on.

I put one on that fit perfectly and looked beautiful. It was that oh-my-start-crying moment you see in movies when the bride finally finds the "right" dress.

"Buy it!" Leslie declares.

"I can't! We're not even engaged! It's seems like bad luck."

Nine months later, he proposed to me in my parents' living room. Wedding planning began. We had a date - September 30, 1995. The ceremony would be at my childhood church. A blue trolley would take us and the wedding party to the reception for dinner and dancing. We had a band and a photographer. I knew how I wanted to style my hair.

I could not find a dress I liked.

I tried on dresses and hated them. I was basically looking for the exact dress I had tried on in New York City. I was close to wearing a burlap sack at my wedding.

A friend of my mom's worked at Laura Ashley and got me to describe the dress I had tried on. She knew exactly which one it was. She said it was from two seasons ago and had been very popular. The chances were slim to none that she would find it but she would try.

A few days later she called to say she found one remaining dress in all of North America (yes - I'm including Canada in this statement). It was my size. It was missing a button and the train had a smudge.

It cost $198.

We easily made a button from fabric in the hem and cleaned the smudge. I look at my wedding photos and like how they look.

We had a beautiful day. Which is only appropriate since it has, for the most part, been a charmed life together. And I have no doubt it will be for decades to come.