(This post, which I wrote shortly after my own daughter's wedding, goes out to my good friend, Leslie Kelly. Leslie's daughter is getting married this weekend and, like it did with my daughter, a hurricane threatens to ruin months of planning. Fingers crossed that all works out as well for your daughter as it did for mine, Les.)
My husband and I live just yards away from the ocean on Florida’s East
Coast. The old-timers call our section
of the state Hurricane Alley because big tropical storms regularly blow our
way. When that happens we evacuate
further inland to my sister’s house taking our most precious possessions along
with us – the family photo albums, the dishes Nana’s mom brought from “the old
country”, my grandmother’s heirloom quilts … and my husband’s fly rods. Once, we didn’t move quickly enough and spent
twelve terrifying hours stranded on the wrong side of the causeway when a
hurricane hit. After watching whole
trees fly past our windows and listening to our walls groan in the wind, we
vowed, “Never again!” and considered ourselves experts on these big
storms. Our advice? “Get out of their way!”
Looking back, it was good advice. Too bad we didn't consider it when planning our daughter's wedding. Despite reams of lists and months of preparation, none of us ever considered the impact of a major hurricane moving
straight up the Atlantic coast and into Washington, DC. I wish
we had.
When our daughter's Maryland wedding approached, hubby and I flew up a week before the
wedding to help with those pesky last minute details – like paying the
bills. We left Florida on Friday, leaving clear skies and
balmy weather behind us. At my
daughter’s, the telephone rang on Sunday.
“We’re heading to your house,” my sister announced. “What do you want us to get?”
I had no idea what she was talking about and told her so.
“You haven’t heard about Floyd?” she asked,
incredulous. “Don’t you watch the
weather up there? Floyd’s a Category 4
storm and he’s headed straight for us.”
I don’t know who decided on giving names to hurricanes;
someone with a wicked sense of humor who wanted to imbue them with
personalities, I guess, but a Category 4 storm was nothing to ignore. Storms get their ratings according to their
strength with Category 1’s something like a toddler having a temper tantrum in
a toy store. Andrew, who nearly
destroyed South Florida, was
the giant who squished the toy store flat at Category 5.
I
asked the really important question, “Are you
still coming to the wedding?”
My question was met by dead silence. At last I heard a big sigh. “If
the airports don’t close and if we
still have a house after this storm, we’ll be there … but I wouldn’t count on
it.”
Uh oh.
My sister was the wedding coordinator and if she couldn’t make it, we
had a big problem. Without her, we had
no one to oversee the caterer, no one to meet the florist at the church, no one
to make sure everyone walked down the aisle on time, no one to hold the
smelling salts. The way things were
going I was pretty sure we’d need those smelling salts.
The telephone rang again.
Someone else wasn’t going to make it out of Florida for the wedding. By Monday night, we had ten
cancellations. Tuesday, another
ten. That night, Floyd made a last
minute turn, struck Florida
a mild, glancing blow and decided instead to head up the East Coast. The cancellations moved right along with
him.
Now, if you’ve ever planned a wedding, you know that the
caterer gets paid in advance. Everything
is based on head count and that number is decided upon weeks before the
wedding. Last minute cancellations are
like flushing money down the toilet; you’ve paid for the meal, the drinks and
the cake, but no one will be there to consume them. By Wednesday, thirty-five of our one hundred
and fifty guests had cancelled; the toilet was flushing like crazy, and Floyd
was bearing down on Baltimore.
We called the caterer.
He suggested we re-schedule. “Out
of the question!” snapped the bride.
We agreed to talk again the next day.
Thursday and Floyd arrived together. The airports closed. The schools closed. The banks closed. But we were in full wedding mode. Armed with lists of errands, we turned a
deaf ear to the storm warnings and ventured out into high winds
and torrential rains. By noon, the father of the bride had driven far enough.
“We’re going home,” he said.
“One more stop,” the bride replied. “We have to pick up my wedding gown.”
A huge gust of wind buffeted the car, pushing us into the
on-coming lane. I screamed. Luckily, ours was the only vehicle on the
road. Hubby muscled us back into
the right-hand lane.
“Nope,” he said and started turning the wheel.
“What about my gown?” she asked.
“If you die trying to get it, you won’t need it,” he
answered.
I tightened my seat belt and longed for the peace and
quiet of the hotel. We had reservations
starting that night. Or at least we did
… until the airport at BWI closed. When
we tried to check in, our suite was not available. Someone else’s flight had been cancelled and
they had not checked out on schedule.
“Throw the bums out,” my husband grumbled.
“Sir, we can’t force them out into the middle of a
hurricane,” replied the clerk without seeming to understand that she was doing the same thing to us.
By Friday morning the storm had passed, the airports
re-opened, and people from all over the country were calling to un-cancel their
cancellations. Thinking the worst was over, the bride and I hopped into our
rental car, drove over power lines and around downed tree limbs, picked up the
wedding gown and managed to arrive at the rehearsal only 45 minutes late.
“It’s all downhill from here,” I thought as the minister
took his place at the front of the church.
But instead of putting us through our paces, the minister asked, "Has anyone checked on the
ballroom?" He was only asking because he
had just stopped at the McDonalds next door.
The McDonalds didn’t have electricity and was closed. A sign on the door said it might be several
days before power was restored.
I had attended a wedding once where the electricity had
failed; I didn’t want to do it again. I reached for the paper bag I carried for
just such emergencies and tried to remember my doctor’s advice: “Put the bag over your mouth and breathe
slowly. Everything will be okay. Just breathe.”
Picking the right date for a wedding is second in
difficulty only to finding the right gal or the right guy to marry. Everyone has a time when they absolutely,
positively cannot be there. Our groom was an ardent basketball fan; he ruled out an entire season. The bride didn’t want to “glow” in her
wedding gown; she vetoed the summer. One
brother-in-law handed us a Florida
State University
football schedule and told us to count him out if FSU was playing the weekend of the wedding. Even my hubby weighed in, suggesting we avoid times when the
fish were running. (His request was
overruled; no one can be that flexible.)
This was our first experience in planning a wedding. Since we only have one daughter, it will be our last. In setting the
date, we tried to consider everyone’s needs.
If we had to do it over again, I wouldn’t listen to a word they
said. I’d just pay more attention to the
weather.
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