My parents had sat us down shortly after we announced our engagement and made us an offer. They’d been married on the steps of a courthouse, and with that in mind they’d said they were going to give us a certain amount of money as an up-front wedding gift. We could use that money for whatever we wanted—to throw a nicer wedding than we could afford on our own (although anything would have been more than we could afford on our own at that point) or to throw a simple wedding and use that money on a down payment for a home or a honeymoon or whatever we chose.
Chip and I decided that we would use the money for the wedding. Since our plan was to move into one of his soon-to-be-vacated student rental houses on Third Street for the summer, we didn’t need extra for a down payment. And Chip’s parents had been kind enough to take care of the honeymoon, so we were set.
I had no desire for a high-priced designer dress, so I went out shopping with my mom and found one off the rack for around five hundred dollars. Just a simple, white, Cinderella-looking dress with a lace-up back—narrow at the waist and then flowing out through the skirt. Chip and his groomsmen wore rented tuxedos from the mall. We weren’t interested in capturing the latest trends or trying to impress anybody. We just wanted it to be beautiful, and the best way I knew to do that was to stick to a classic, timeless look, so black-and-white attire with red roses was the palette we chose. Plus, we knew all of those beautiful white roses in the Harrison House gardens would give us the perfect backdrop we dreamed of.
The day before the wedding, we went over to the property for the rehearsal and I just about died: the estate had pruned all of the roses. They were gone—every last one of them! There was nothing there but empty stems. The arbors, the arch over the altar, everything was just leaves and thorns.
Sadly, it just happened to be the time of year to prune the roses. It was a professionally kept garden, like an arboretum, and the time had come. I mean, I think they could have waited an extra day or two knowing they had a wedding that weekend, but it was too late to argue. In a last-minute attempt to save the scene, we scrambled to our parents to ask for a flower budget. We bought hundreds and hundreds of white roses and stuck them in bunches all over the arbors and barren bushes, doing our best to fill in a million holes and make it look like the real roses were still there.
When I look at pictures now, it may be obvious that those roses had been stuck in by hand, but that wasn’t the point. It was honestly almost better that all of our closest friends and family had come together at the last minute and tried to turn this venue back into the place we’d been dreaming about.
It really was perfect—perfect for us—and part of the reason for that is we broke tradition in some ways. For example, Chip insisted that his dog, Shiner, be in the wedding. We haven’t mentioned Chip’s dog yet, but that mutt was Chip’s best friend. I still swear to this day that he loved that dog more than he loved me. My bridesmaids weren’t crazy about the idea of Shiner being a member of the wedding party, but Chip wouldn’t budge. Heck, Shiner would’ve been Chip’s best man if he could’ve stood at the end of that aisle and held those rings. But we compromised and set him up under a gorgeous oak tree so he could be comfortable in the shade as he watched his old man get married.
My dad and I arrived at the ceremony by horse-drawn carriage. A trumpeter played us in. We had a little string quartet and a beautiful couple who sang during the ceremony. All of our closest friends were there. It was a day we’ll never forget.
I still look back at it as one of the best days of my life. A lot of my friends and her friends met for the first time at this wedding, because we were literally from different universes. But they were all so important to us, and I just remember that all my buddies were like, “She has got the sweetest friends!”
All these people kind of came together and became buddies. It was great. And there were some funny coincidences too. Jo had twins in her wedding party, and I had twins in mine. I mean, what are the chances of that?
Chip’s dad was his best man. My sisters were my maid and matron of honor. The fact that our friends got along so well and that we both put family first were just more signs to me that Chip and I weren’t all that different where it counted. There were a lot of similarities between us, and that day seemed to be filled with affirmations of just how much we truly belonged together.
The wedding seemed to have a ripple effect too. My sister Mary Kay brought this guy to the wedding that she’d only been on a few dates with. His name was David. Well, she caught the bouquet, he caught the garter, and they wound up getting married too. How’s that for a story?
Chip and I started our honeymoon off in New York City, where I had done my internship. One of my favorite things to do when I lived alone in New York was just walk its streets. There are fascinating landmarks around every corner, people of every culture and background and style you could ever imagine, and so many interesting shops and restaurants. No matter how many times you walked those streets, you would always, always find something new.
One of the most surprising finds to me were the little individual shops and boutiques, whether they were clothing stores or home furnishing stores or gift shops. It was almost as if the owners of those little individual shops had to work extra hard to make sure their businesses could compete with the big chains and expensive stores all over town—and the results were incredible.
There always seemed to be a candle burning, filling those shops with the delicious scents. It wasn’t unusual to see fresh flowers on the counter next to the cash register or for the shopkeeper to offer you a cup of coffee or tea while you browsed. There was something just wonderfully inviting and warm about those places that made me feel very connected in a city that could sometimes feel big and overwhelming.
I loved taking Chip to that great big city and showing him a side of me he hadn’t seen before. We acted like rich kids and stayed in a suite at the Drake Hotel, a high-end, first-class place on Park Avenue that had once played host to celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Lillian Gish. But that was just the starting point for our adventure.
We set aside a full two weeks for our honeymoon, and other than those couple of nights at the Drake, we made no plans whatsoever. We decided to rent a little car and just go wherever the day took us. We headed upstate and marveled as the massive city gave way so quickly to hills and rivers and fields full of flowers. Before long the tallest buildings around were the silos on old-fashioned farms that dotted the landscape.
Chip and I both had an affection for farms and old barns and silos, and we decided it would be fun to go explore. If we saw an abandoned barn, all gray and weathered and tipping over in some empty field, we’d stop and go walk around it, even duck inside just to see what was there. Occasionally we’d find old bottles and farm equipment, and I always wondered why someone had just up and abandoned them there for all those years.
The thing I found interesting was just how beautiful everything looked. The rust, the age, the weathering—maybe it was just because we were in love, but everything we saw in those old abandoned barns, both inside and out, seemed to capture and reflect the beauty of the land and the air and the early summer scents in that beautiful corner of the world. Even the dust in those old barns seemed to rise up on purpose, helping to illuminate those old forgotten spaces with streams of sunlight that crept through the cracks in the wood.
We didn’t have Google Maps in 2003, so we spent that honeymoon road trip following our intuition and heeding the attraction of little signs on the side of the road: “Antiques” or “Bed & Breakfast” or “Pick-Ur-Own!” We agreed that we would drive until we were both dead tired and then find someplace to lay our heads wherever we happened to wind up.