One Week Ago Today

Today is our one week anniversary. What a difference a week makes!

This time last week I had been up for four hours formatting and cutting the inserts for the wedding programs and was just jumping into the shower in a mad dash. I hadn’t tried on my dress since I bought it at the Macy’s in Missoula, MT three weeks earlier.

I discovered that I didn’t have my foundation so I was frantically scrounging around my mother’s bathroom. My clothes and cosmetics were scattered from one bathroom on one side of the house to my parent’s bedroom on the other side of the house so Ben and Becca were my runners, fetching items for me so I wouldn’t risk running into Terry before the wedding. They were great. Ben even gave me a shoulder rub and a hug to calm me down when I started crying because I didn’t have any foundation.

The dress fit except for the gaping armholes which Diane tried unsuccessfully to close with a safety pin. No problem, I just had to have perfect posture for about two hours to keep everything in place!

With my hair still wet, no make-up and no shoes, we got the word that it was time for Diane to be seated.

The processional had started!

The mother of the bride was being seated and the groom was waiting for the bride outside the french doors of my parent’s bedroom that opened onto the patio where the guests were ready to witness a wedding.

But no one bothered to ask if the bride was ready!!!!

Well, it was MY day so let them wait. (Easier to say when your wedding is at 10:00 a.m. when there’s still the hope of a breeze.)

Dad who was in charge of the sound just used his little remote control to replay “Unchained Melody” four times (a lovely piano version played by Yuko Ohigashi, a talented young woman who recorded it when she was just 15).

Finally, I had it together enough to step out onto the patio, take the arm of the man who loves me and walk down that aisle to pledge my never-ending love to him. How could I do otherwise? He thinks I’m beautiful with or without make-up.

What a difference a week makes.

Now we’re making out lists of things we need to buy at Home Depot.

And I couldn’t be happier!

One Week and counting

Dateline: June 7,2008 8:18am

Exactly one week ago this date and time, I was scurrying around trying to remember, what I may have forgotten, where I was supposed to be and what I needed to transfer to my future in-laws for our wedding. The hectic pace seemed calm at the time. No nervous feelings, just anticipation of a great future ahead for Taylor and me.

About this same hour, I was taking some Seasons of Salado coffee (Our favorite) to my in-laws, for Taylor. Along with the coffee, I was delivering a special gift for her wedding morning. Great care was made by all to assure I did not see the bride. Dressed in floppy shirt and shorts, I didn’t even wear any shoes. After all it was a short drop off trip.

After delivering my parcels and helping with a couple of set up items, I headed out the door , back for our home to dress. On the front steps are a couple of decorative rocks. Wouldn’t you know it, I stumbled on one and jammed my toe directly into the largest one.

My attire for the wedding, was dress white shirt, black dress pants and the black cowboy boots Taylor had bought me on her last visit to Michigan.

Ever try wearing cowboy boots with a swollen toe. Not an easy task. But I prevailed and wore them through the ceremony. Before we left for our Yellow Caboose (see other post and Flickr account for pics) we stopped by our home for a change of shoes.

That afternoon, Taylor examined my toe and we decided even though it was discolored and swollen, it was not broken. A few days later it was reduced and the natural colors had returned. Still tender but much better.

We all had a wonderful time and the wedding was beautiful. The honeymoon was perfect and I must say, the marriage was the smartest thing I have ever done. Taylor is all I could have asked for and more.

I love her with all my heart and soul!

Today we celebrate our one week anniversary and we look forward to the next 50 years or so. Together, walking hand in hand down the path of life.

TERRY

Our Wedding Announcement

Taylor Willingham of Salado and Terry Crain (Traverse City, Michigan) were married on Saturday morning May 31 in a family ceremony at the home of the bride’s parents, Ben and June Willingham, also of Salado. After a brief honeymoon in a yellow caboose on lake LBJ in Texas Hill Country, the couple will reside in Salado.

The couple first met in high school in Longwood, Florida where Taylor was the editor of the yearbook and Terry was the photographer. They reconnected online late last July after being separated since 1975. After a first date to the opera La Traviata in Chicago last October and frequent flights to meet in Salado and Traverse City, Terry proposed next to the Christmas tree at Lincoln Center in New York following the opera, War and Peace.

After careful deliberation, Taylor, a consultant in deliberation and public policy, accepted Terry’s proposal on New Year’s Day beside the pond near her home on Salado Springs Circle.

Taylor is an active member of the Salado community serving as a board member of the Salado Education Foundation and a Salado Library Board Trustee. She will continue to teach graduate library school courses for the University of Illinois and manage Texas Forums, a program of the LBJ Library that she founded five years ago. Terry is starting a consulting and reconstruction business specializing in home security systems, minor construction repairs and household rehabilitation for independent living. Taylor, a frequent blogger and contributor to professional journals will continue her writing. Terry will take the photographs!

Photos Slowly Coming Together

Well, we’ve been married for almost a week, but we still don’t have our photos organized, nor have we kept up our blog. We’re having a blast, but it will take some adjustment to having someone else around. I think I’ve been slightly disoriented because I just can’t seem to focus and don’t feel very productive. That will change tomorrow, I’m sure! In the meantime here are some photos from the wedding and the honemoon:

http://web.mac.com/benwillingham/Site_4/T_and_T_Wedding.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dianemiller/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12080636@N07/sets/72157605467606400/

I WILL get something a bit more elegant written and loaded here soon, I promise.

“Inn the News”

Just got a call from Will, the proprietor of Inn on the Creek gushing about my last blog posting prominently featuring his lovely establishment. After suffering for weeks painfully sworn to secrecy about the bridal luncheon he was hosting for Jenna Bush, you can understand he was delighted to launch his blog with a description of the day.

I’m almost breathless from reading his post because a) it sounds like a simple yet delicious and scrumptious day (I took notes), and b) Will’s relief at finally being able to shout out the news is palpable! (Have you come down enough to sleep, Will?)

Congratulations Will and Chris and the Staff of Inn on the Creek. Y’all done good by us Saladoans, keeping us on the map as the best darned wedding destination in Central Texas!

Big Wedding News in Salado

There’s big wedding news here in Salado. The whole town is buzzing! It made the evening news last night. The streets were lined with tourists and residents alike straining for a peek. But weddings aren’t anything new here, especially for a wedding wonderland like Inn on the Creek. Hmmm…

Salado, my home town, is the preferred destination for brides all across the country. Weddings are big business here. Florists, wedding planners, B&Bs, photographers…we’ve got it all in this cozy little village. How lucky am to be a resident of this lovely jewel in the heart of Central Texas AND to be a bride.

And Inn on the Creek is THE hot spot for weddings. You can get married on the lawn, have cocktails on the sweeping porch overlooking the creek and then a private dinner in the small dining room for 12 or in the larger dining room for 25. Then the couple can make their way up three flights of stairs to the preferred bridal suite, the McKie Room

It is a beautiful spot and for two days, it was my chosen location. But for reasons I’ll disclose in another posting (reasons that will be obvious to people who know my taste and see these pictures) we have made other arrangements which I’ll also disclose later.

So even though I won’t be getting married at Inn on the Creek, it is still amusing that my initial wedding site was the chosen location for the Jenna Bush bridesmaid luncheon yesterday. (Did you really think that the big wedding buzz was about MY wedding?)

We see lots of weddings and pre-wedding parties in this town, but oh what fanfare we can put on when it involves the President’s daughter. Never mind that this was to be a secret affair. I knew the cat was out of the bag when I drove into town and saw the flags lining the streets two weeks ahead of Memorial Day! For an artsy little shopper’s paradise, a visit from the first Daughter, first lady, former first lady (first mother?) and later the President himself, was news

And BIG news it was – over 1,200 google hits for “Salado Jenna Bush” including an AP article that had this to say:

Early in the day, the three attended a bridal lunch for family and friends at an inn in Salado, more than an hour’s drive south of Crawford. They stayed the day in the small tourist village, founded before the Civil War, getting ready for the evening events. The president made his way solo to Salado.

There the parents of the groom, Henry Hager, hosted the rehearsal dinner for members of the family and the wedding party at the Old Salado Springs Celebration Center in the heart of the town filled with coffee shops, western-style stores, antiques, eateries and clothing shops.

Then later, all of the wedding guests, some just arriving in the area, were invited to what was billed a “Texas-sized celebration” at the Salado Silver Spur Theater in the village, once a stagecoach stop.

Well, my wedding won’t be such big news here in town even though my parents are local celebrities and the oldest white settler of Salado was a Willingham (no relation, but still…). But the wedding will still be a perfectly lovely occassion, I’m sure. Like Jenna, I’m getting married in Central Texas in my parent’s back yard, albeit a much smaller back yard than the Western White House. And it will be a smaller crowd – eight family members, two couple friends and the bride and groom.

No time to fill you in on the wedding plans now. I’m to busy with the doing! But I promise to write more later when I’m not rushing to the post office to mail Terry his new cell phone.

Organizing the Wedding

This advice just came to me in an e-mail from Susan, a library student at UIUC where I teach.

Just a thought I had the week before my wedding:  all the hoopla and organization is specifically planned to keep you from thinking about what you’re doing!  Don’t worry — next year will be twenty years for me and my husband.

The best thing I did was have one of those 6″x10″ spiral notebooks.  Each page was a separate topic with notes, phone #s, etc. (like dress, flowers, music).  It really helped.  Of course that was twenty years ago — now you can do it on your laptop or PDA.  I just liked being able to hold it in my hand.

Seems like simple advice, but boy what a difference. And that kind of organizing is just what you’d expect from a librarian!

In our relationship, Terry is the planner often joking that he might need to go to Planners Anonymous. But for the wedding, I’m on top of the planning process. (I think.)

Being the geek that I am, of course I am using a technological notebook. I’m using Notetaker by Aquaminds, a very inexpensive a cool way to organize information into electronic notebooks. Even though we are only having a small family wedding plus two close couple friends (total = 12 people including us!) I still want it to be lovely but casual, contemporary with tradition and ritual, and light but memorable. All of that takes planning and whether you use a spiral binder, post-it notes, carved tablets or a computer system, take Susan’s advice. I am!

To my Mason-Parker Family members

[Posted on our My Family web site]

Subject: Taylor Willingham is getting married

Yeah, that’s quite a shocker, I know. But after being single for almost three decades, I’ve found someone I want to be with for the rest of my life. I found Terry Crain online, but that’s not where we met. That’s just how we found each other thirty-three years after we graduated from high school in Florida and went separate ways – me to California and he to northern Michigan. (Who do you think made the wiser move?) But I reconnected with him during my research on democracy and social networking when I joined a network for high school classmates and discovered that he had been looking for me for two years. I called him last July and over the past six months we have met in Chicago (saw the opera “La Traviata”), Texas, Michigan, New York (where he proposed to me at Lincoln Center under the Christmas Tree after the opera “War and Peace”), and again in Texas where I finally accepted his proposal.)

I was editor of the high school yearbook and he was the photographer so we spent many hours in the dark room. (These poor kids growing up in the digital age are really missing out!) He had a crush on me, but I was dating someone from another school. Still, I must have felt some fondness for him even then because it really isn’t necessary for the editor to follow the photographer around the sidelines at every football game and then spend hours with him “developing” things in the dark room. Obviously I enjoyed his company and look forward to making up for losing the last 33 years.

At age 50, we are like teenagers – silly, romantic, technologically connected, (speaking of which, my 11 year old niece is sending me ichats as I write this!), and starry-eyed. But we also have the wisdom, patience, and resources of 50 year olds! My 50th year has been fabulous – I love being 50 and don’t know why it’s supposed to be so traumatic. It just makes sense that this is the right time for me to find someone right for me and for me to BE right for someone.

So, if you’re waiting for a wedding date, I hate to disappoint you, but since we are waiting to sell his house and don’t want to waste any time, we probably won’t have a wedding…just a small affair with the folks, Brent and Terri and Ben and Becca. At our age, we don’t need all of the pomp, I’m too busy to be in the event planning business, and we absolutely DO NOT want any gifts – we’re holding garage sales in two states to get rid of excess stuff. We have lots we want to do the house and we want to travel some so he can meet my relatives and California friends. Then we’ll throw lots of parties to celebrate.