Picture a wedding. What comes to mind? White dresses, bridesmaids in matching colors, extensive guest lists, showers, bachelor/bachelorette parties, walking up the aisle, flowers and music, elaborate receptions with carefully chosen (and usually expensive) food and drink, cake, first dances, honeymoons. Gifts. Lots of gifts—at showers, for bridesmaids and groomsmen, party favors for wedding guests, and gifts for the newly married couple. Of course, this vision wasn’t always so.
During WWII many couples, including my parents, improvised their weddings. Mom and Dad rescheduled twice and finally got married on the third try. Their wedding resembled the small, intimate weddings that have become common during COVID-Times.
For some, the simplicity has been freeing. Too often weddings take on a life of their own. The couple can become performers of a script they didn’t wholeheartedly choose.
This spring when our sons marry, they will have the essentials: love and commitment. Close friends and family standing by to support them. Meaningful vows. A pleasing setting and celebratory food. Joy. Everything they need.
Although my parents didn’t live to see their grandsons marry, there’s a pleasing symmetry in these small COVID-style weddings. When the times call for it, love finds a way.
Weather wizards are implying a decent Easter weekend. Warm enough for plastic eggs to be hidden outside amid rapidly growing daffodils while avoiding winter piles of rabbit turds.
My husband remembers Easter egg hunting as a wonderful annual event in Indiana. Every single year while our kids were growing up he was disappointed by rain, or slush, or plain old snow and would tell them about how the Easter Bunny hid eggs and treats outside when he was a child. The stories returned when a grandchild appeared. And we watched her search for plastic eggs and her basket in snow last year. This year will be different.
Now there is a reality check-my husband’s brother and sister don’t have that same Easter memory. They remember wearing winter coats to church on Easter a number of years, other years when sleet froze the daffodils, and maybe one or two years that all came together in the way he holds as the “every year” family happening. One time we took our children to Indiana for Easter and an outdoor egg hunt. Part of the drive included iced over car windows and slipping on icy roads from Indianapolis to his hometown. Not even living bunnies were out that morning.
My father’s parents had a tradition (I was told) of giving us live critters for Easter—little chicks or bunnies or a kitten. There are pictures of me as a toddler with a skeptical face as a real, live bunny sits in a pretty basket next to me. Being rural and practical, my grandparents insisted my parents take these critters home to become future egg bearers or dinner. I never heard what happed to the kitten, but I assumed it went elsewhere because my mother hated cats. And the bunny? It’s fate was settled after biting me on the finger and chin. Again, that is what I was told, and knowing the players I believe it to be true.
One year my mother and father fully celebrated the end of the Easter Vigil with friends. That night they did hide our eggs outside. My mother planted them next to the back porch and set the chocolate bunnies next to the row of colored shells to protect future egg trees. These were not plastic eggs or plastic wrapped bunnies. She was too sick to supervise the morning hunt. My dad did what he could to pull some fun into setting dirty eggs and messed up chocolate bunnies in our baskets. After church, we headed to our grandparents for clean jellybeans and the annual disagreement about taking home live chicks.
Eventually we moved to a city. My parents changed friends. Easter became safe fun followed by Mass where we squirmed about in new church clothes. Two states south my future husband, a time or two, searched outside for eggs and other surprises appropriately hidden.
May your holiday be peaceful. Peace for our country is all I want in my basket. Save the bunny.
I’ve never been super orderly or systematic, but for years, filing papers seemed like the responsible thing to do. Before computers and the Internet, you needed hard copies of financial, health, and school records. Digital wasn’t an option. Sometimes the only convenient way to access a how-to lore was to keep a photocopy of it. As part of an office redo, I’ve been sorting, tossing, and shredding old paper files. Although some of what I saved makes sense, a lot of it is baffling.
1972 – High school diploma from the pre-digital age when paper was the only valid proof.
1976 –Where’s my college diploma? Good thing I don’t have to prove that anymore.
1979 –Graduate school grade reports. Why?? And inexplicably, grade slips from three management classes my father took.
1978 – A photocopy of copyright information (pre-Internet). I suspect I hoped to publish something worthy of a copyright.
1984-85 – Wedding catering quotes. I truly don’t know why I kept these. Maybe I thought the information would be helpful when my sister married. Years after our wedding, when I rediscovered the file, I kept it for its entertainment value: Miss Lucille’s Catering: hot buffet with two meats, one kind of potato, one vegetable, a salad, and dinner rolls for $4.75 per person. Plus $1.50 for china, silverware and linen service. Despite the reasonable prices, we went with another caterer, but I didn’t keep that!
1988 and 1991 – Proposals to work remotely after our sons were born. WAY before corporations were flexible with working mothers. I outlined a plan to return to full-time work after my maternity leave. I would work mornings at home and afternoons in the office for several months. I’m still surprised and grateful I got to do it. Twice.
1992 – Landscape plans for our old house. We haven’t lived there for 5+ years. Why’d I keep them? Maybe because I put a ton of sweat and love into those gardens, a passion that developed after our second son was born in 1991. Gardening was a creative outlet that didn’t require a babysitter.
1995 – 2006 – Vendor contracts and confidentiality agreements. I was in business from 1992 – 2010, but either companies didn’t require agreements or I quit saving them.
2005 – Records from breast biopsy #2 and #3 – stereotactic then excisional. I don’t know why I kept the details from this painful time. Maybe to remind myself how lucky I’d been?
2008 – Adjunct teaching contract from St. Thomas University’s Master of Business Communications program. One class, one semester: $4050. Even then, it wasn’t much money.
2013 – Yellowed copy of a Star Tribune review of an anthology in which I had an essay.
This ephemera maps some of what I thought was valuable, but I wasn’t saving the right stuff.
The real treasures are the snapshots from the 1920s and 1940s tucked in with some of my mother’s Medicare records. I also found four thin files of family history written by my parents, sister, and me.
My grandma and grandpa. I’m guessing from their big smiles, he was returning from WWI. On the porch is my great grandma, a woman I never met.
If only my file drawers held more of what’s precious—my parents’ belief in education. The hopeful start of my parents’ and grandparents’ loving marriages. Irreplaceable stories about immigrant ancestors.
My parents’ wedding in 1944 during WWII–Aunt Corinne, Mom, Dad, Grandma & Grandpa (also shown above).
