Describe the happiest day of your life.

Throughout the month of January, WordPress is sending participating bloggers a writing prompt each day. It’s a way to find some creative inspiration and perhaps make connections with other bloggers. My entries in this blogging challenge will appear here under the tag #bloganuary.

On the happiest day of my life, I married my best friend, who became the mother of our children and the grandmother of our grandchildren, in a simple ceremony that we had planned together, with a single criterion: this needs to be fun for us, and any part of the ceremony that didn’t meet that basic requirement was eliminated. We picked music we liked, we wrote our own vows, and we kept certain parts of the otherwise traditional ceremony because they were meaningful to us. The wedding party had a several members of our families in it, because our friends from the ministry we both had worked in were mostly not in favor of our marriage, because I was divorced a couple of years earlier. By the day of the wedding, I couldn’t have cared less that they weren’t there.

We picked 11 a.m. as the time for our ceremony because we wanted a lunch reception during which we could actually spend some time with the relatives (and a few friends) who came to see us get married, instead of just jumping right into the car and heading off for the honeymoon.

Carolyn was, of course, beautiful in the very lovely wedding dress that she made herself, but she could just as well have worn her overalls and a t-shirt and I would still have been utterly captivated by her. I could scarcely believe then, nor can I fully comprehend now, that I was given the gift of a life with her. We walked down the aisle together, we recited our vows, we said “I do,” we kissed (a great one as I recall), and most of the rest of the ceremony was a blur.

After the ceremony, as the guests were leaving, someone mentioned that they had left a wedding gift for us at a department store downtown, so on our way back to my folks’ house, we stopped off at the store, still in our wedding get-up, happy to be turning some heads.

Yes, we had fun. And we still do, nearly forty years later.

I love you, Carolyn.