Flip-flops, a variety of the ugliest dresses we could find from a thrift store, and yes, the man behind Joel is wearing a skirt. (He was really good friends with both of us and couldn’t pick a side.) I’m wearing a friend’s old prom dress (because it was white and fit with some tweaking) and Joel is pimpin’ his band tux from college. There were also two blow-up football characters at our wedding, representative of our friends who were in Iraq and couldn’t be there; one of them had a cigarette taped to his face as he was a smoker. Indeed, those are our matching toes-Joel was a princess that day, and well…every day really.

We lit sparklers out of that unity candle and it turned black; we kept a few years but think it has since been thrown away in one of the moves. We have no idea where those glasses went, I wore those white flip-flops around years afterward until they also had to be thrown out. That arbor that we helped Joel’s parent’s build now has an extended patio on it, where there’s a fire pit to gather around. We used the friend’s large dress, with the print on the end, as a shower curtain in an apartment somewhere along the way. I had a dressmaker cut up my dress to surprise Joel for our five year anniversary; she made two skirts and a shirt out of it.

Our photographer was the wife of Joel’s dad’s co-workers, I think is how that traced back, and these wedding pics had to be scanned in and emailed to us as the pictures we have are still in boxes. That’s totally a picture of my veil over his head, and I’m not sure why Joel is being held up by his friends, but there it is.

The friend (green dress) immediately behind me, was running around that day taking shots with my 35mm Minolta that I’d bought for the one photo class I took in college. I loaded it with some slide film and said just get a few shots of whatever you find that’s cool, then had it cross-processed. I think those are the pictures that are tucked into a box with us, and are our favorites from the day. I’m riding around on Joel’s back, we’re goofing around with the cake that had daisies on it, picked from the creek at the end of the yard. A month later, our friend there in the yellow dress, got married and needed a person with a camera and called us the day before the wedding. We had a camera. Then the friend in the purple dress got married and we also had a camera then. Pretty soon it was strangers that wanted to pay us, and we got two cameras.

Eight years later, we realize these images are nothing like what we would want today, but neither is the wedding and I think that’s the point; that people evolve and grow-up together. This was us during a brief time in our lives, with three months of “planning” while in school, and the fact that we had this experience with pictures, helps push us to we make the ones that we do now. We wouldn’t change anything as it was through the amazing help of our friends and family that even made it at all possible. I remember friends painting our cake topper that day, laying mulch in the front yard, Joel picking out music 5 minutes before the ceremony, learning how to make pavers by trial and error, and saying “sure” a lot to his mom while I worked on school projects. Maybe on our ten year we’ll give it another go…flip-flops and fancy toes would probably still be involved.

What I do wish we’d had the foresight to do was take a camera with us to Steak ‘N’ Shake (a 24 hr burger joint, as we’d forgotten to eat the grill-goodies from earlier in the night) and the midnight movie we saw at the $2 theatre (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) in our full wedding garb afterward.