The Barn Where The County Got Married

Chapter 5

I could fill a book with the weddings.

There was the girl from the diner in town, the one who refilled coffee for truckers at five in the morning, who married a long-haul driver in my barn in a dress her mother made from a pattern.

There was the boy who came home from overseas with a limp and stood up straight as a fence post anyway while his bride walked the plank floor toward him.

There was a couple in their sixties, both widowed, who found each other at a grief group and did not want a fuss, just my barn and twelve folding chairs and a preacher, and I swept it out for them the same as I swept it for the young ones.

There was the year it stormed so hard during a July wedding that we lost the power, and I ran out to the house for every candle and lantern I owned, and that wedding finished by flame with the rain going sideways on the metal roof, and the bride told me later it was the only way she would have wanted it.

There was the couple who could not afford cake and flowers both, so I made the cakes and I cut every peony I had and filled fruit jars down both aisles.

There was the pair who got married on a Saturday and whose little girl I watched get married in the same barn twenty-two years later. I swept the floor for the mother in 1991 and for the daughter in 2013, and I did not tell the daughter I had cried for her mother on that same back bench, but I had.

There was a shy pair who worked at the hatchery and could only afford a Tuesday, so I swept the barn on a Tuesday and hung the lights on a Tuesday and baked the cakes on a Tuesday, and I would do it again.