A Wedding and John Wayne

This weekend, Brandon and I went the wedding of Melissa, one of my friends from school, to Raphael, one of our neighbors here in grad housing. I am excited to have Melissa be my neighbor, but that means we're not the newest newlyweds on the block anymore. Oh well!

It feels good to have some time and distance between us and all the drama proceeding our own wedding back in August. As I watched Melissa get ready for her big day this last week, I couldn't help but relive the days prior to my own stint as a bride. Those days are so full of people and preparations and parties. And that is the perfect recipe for drama of all kinds--I know all you once-brides are nodding your head in agreement right now.

It feels good to be down to the business of living our lives together. Don't get me wrong, we enjoyed our wedding, especially the ceremony, but it is so nice to settle into couplehood. We've had a unique opportunity to do that out here in LA, away from the pressures and expectations of family and friends (not that we don't miss them terribly). Here we are free to discover our own path, to figure out what it means for us to be one. It reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the movie McClintock, a John Wayne classic and a Wohlert family favorite. In the scene John Wayne's character is sharing a fatherly moment with his daughter trying to explain one of life's beautiful mysteries:

"There's something I ought to tell you, I guess now's as good a time
as any. You're gonna have every young buck West of the Missouri around
here trying to marry you. Mostly because you're a handsome filly, but
partly cause I own everything in this country from here to there. And
they'll think your gonna inherit it. Well, your not. I'm going to
leave most of it, well, to the nation, really, for a park, where no
lumber mill, can cut down all the trees for houses with leaky roofs.
Nobody will kill all the beaver for hats for dudes. Or murder the
buffalo for robes.

"What I'm gonna give you is a 500 cow spread on the upper Green River.
While that might not seem like much, that's more than we had, your
mother and I. Some folks are gonna say I'm doing all this so I can sit
up in the hereafter and look down on a park named after me. Or that I
was disappointed in you, didn't want you to get all that money. But
the real reason, Becky, is because I love you, and I want you and some
young man to have what I had. Because all the gold in the United
States Treasury and all the harp music in heaven can't equal what
happens between a man and a woman, with all that growing together. I
can't explain it any better than that."