Every girl dreams of her wedding day. It’s only natural, and I’m not so different. What does make me different though is that I had already decided the date before the age of ten.

    I envisioned a funky Halloween wedding. All the guests would arrive in costume. The location – somewhere spooky like a Victorian mansion on a hill or a crumbling castle – would be decorated in the traditional black and orange streamers, tombstones, and classic monsters. The bride’s cake would be red velvet and shaped like a giant black widow spider. Strawberry filling would ooze between layers when it was cut, giving the illusion that the spider was bleeding.

    I thought it was great. My mother cringed whenever I spoke of my grand plans.

    “And just who do you plan to marry?” Mom asked more than once.

    “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that part out yet.” I never gave much thought to who I would marry, trusting that I would eventually meet the man of my dreams. Mom had met hers and so would I.

    Mom and Dad were married on June 15, 1952. I thought it was an incredibly common day to get married. It seemed to me that everyone wanted to be a “June bride”. (My eyes rolled whenever I heard the phrase. Still do, actually.) She must have been happy with the date, happy to be one of the thousands, if not millions, of “June brides” in the world. I swore I would never be one.

    But, as they say, “Never say never.”

    Dad died in August 1992. I moved to Denver, Colorado in July 1998. I met my then husband-to-be in November 1998. By that time, I’d given up the idea of actually getting married. Mom and Dad had had forty years and many more ahead of them when he died. It broke Mom’s heart to let Dad go. I didn’t want to face that kind of pain, and I thought that if I didn’t get married, then I wouldn’t have to face it.

    Unfortunately, I neglected to tell Mark, my husband-to-be, that little detail. Heck, I even neglected to remember it myself. In November 2001, when he asked me to marry him, I eagerly accepted.

    We’d never really discussed marriage before our engagement. Now that we had a reason, I brought out an old chestnut – the Halloween wedding. Mark loved it. We announced our engagement and the date of the following October 31 to my family a few weeks later.
Mom was thrilled with the wedding but wasn’t overjoyed with the date. However, Mark and I were happy. Well, Mark was happy at least.

    Some unnamed feeling nagged at the back of my mind whenever plans for the October wedding were discussed. The date no longer seemed to fit. It didn’t seem right. I kept my worries to myself and continued with the plans for an extravagant costumed ceremony and party.

    In April 2002, I finally discovered what had been bugging me for months. It was a simple date - June 15, 2002. If Dad had still been alive, it would have been his and Mom’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. Dad had always said he wanted a big celebration for their golden anniversary. Only immediate family and a few close friends had attended their wedding in 1952. Dad had planned to have a huge party and take Mom on a trip to anywhere she wanted to go for their fiftieth. He never got the chance.

    June 15 was only a few months away, and the realization of Mom spending the day alone hit me like Frankenstein’s monster. I couldn’t let the day – their anniversary – go by forgotten. I talked to Mark and we hatched a plan. If only Mom would agree to it.
Mark and I approached Mom one night as she sat sewing a new blouse for her to wear to church. I sat on the edge of her bed while Mark stood beside me. “Mom, can Mark and I talk to you for a second?”

    She looked up. Her green eyes peeked over the rosy rims of her bifocals, darting from me to Mark and back. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re up to something?”

    “We’re not up to anything.” I laughed nervously.
   
    “Not much,” Mark added.

    Mom stopped her sewing and turned to face us. “How much is it going to cost me?”

    That was something Dad would have said, and I felt tears welling up. “Uh, nothing. Mark and I are paying for everything.” I looked up at Mark and he nodded. Before I lost my nerve, I blurted the question out. “Would you mind if Mark and I changed the wedding date to June 15? I know it was yours and Dad’s day, but this would have been y’all’s fiftieth. I know Dad always wanted a big party on that day, so why not have a wedding?”

    Mom stared at us. I wasn’t sure she had understood me, and then she began crying. “I think he would have liked that a lot.”

    “So it’s okay?” I thought my heart was going to leap out of my chest and run circles around the bed.

    “Yeah, it’s okay,” she whispered.

    I don’t remember everything that was said after that, but I know it involved a lot of laughter and tears. Halloween had been tossed out the window, along with all our carefully laid plans. We now had only two months to plan a wedding.
   
    How do you plan an elaborate wedding in eight weeks? Simple answer: You don’t.

    Mark and I scaled the size of the ceremony down drastically. We decided to mirror Mom and Dad’s wedding of 1952 and invited only immediate family and a few close friends.