It's Me, Sara Louise

This is my step-mother’s mini-van that she let us borrow while we were visiting. Gregory had never driven a mini-van before (actually I don’t think he had even ever been in one) and he fell in love with it. He christened it the ‘Disco Van’ and zoomed about between western Massachusetts (where my Dad lived) and New York (where my friends are) blaring Motown and embracing his inner soccer mom. To this day he still wants a mini-van.

The church where we got married. I’ve never told you this but our wedding was a rushy-rush affair. Moving to France was the commitment for me, marriage wasn’t that important, but it was to my Dad. He started asking when Gregory and I were going to get married and it got me thinking… back when I was eighteen, my father was in a coma that he wasn’t supposed to wake up from. When he was ‘sleeping’ I told him that he needed to wake up so he could perform my wedding ceremony one day (he was a Reverend). Since he woke up for me, I thought it was only fair that I followed through on what I said.

So I started thinking about a wedding the following Fall, maybe October. An Autumn wedding in the Berkshires would be beautiful! I called my step-mother and asked her what she thought, and when she said that she didn’t know if my dad would still be there in the Fall, Gregory and I got our skates on and planned our little Massachusetts wedding in barely a month.

I didn’t care where we got married, as long as my dad did the ceremony that was fine by me. It could have been in his livingroom, under a tree in his back yard, even in a diner, I really didn’t care. But then he called me and told me he reserved a place in a church, the very same church my great-grandparents were married in. So it was in that church where my frail father performed my wedding ceremony in the very same spot my great-grandparents had been married in over a hundred years before (please excuse me while I grab some tissues).

And that there on the right is my maid of honor, and on the left, Gregory’s Best Man Girl.

My red velvet wedding cake that was sinfully delicious. We left the restaurant with the top tier of the cake with plans to eat it on our first wedding anniversary, but once we realized that it would be impossible to get it safely back to France, we scarfed it down like wee little vultures.

There’s my father and Gregory after the wedding at a bistro named Firefly where we went for pre-dinner drinks. For some reason I like to see my dad in black and white now. It’s like I’m freezing him in time like an old movie reel. A year after this photo was taken we returned to Firefly for dinner following my father’s funeral. It was nice to be able to go back to the last spot where we had all been happy together (excuse me while I grab another tissue).