June is Wedding Month by Pepper Phillips

I was married in June.

We didn’t plan it that way. But my boyfriend just returned from overseas duty and we decided to get married. He’d been gone for a year, out in Japan and the Philippines training with the Marines. There were no phone calls, no Skype, no anything but letters.

I wrote often, as did he. I still have those letters in a cedar box that was a present from my Dad when I was a kid. In those letters we laid out our hearts, our dreams, our wishes. Though them we learned about each other, and knew that we wanted to stay together, forever.

We posted our banns at the church and had to wait three weeks in order to get married. So, June 16th was chosen.

Then we’d leave California and travel to Louisiana to visit with his family until he had to report for duty at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Planning a wedding in three weeks was easy. We booked the church for the first available date. The time was the problem. We got married at nine in the morning.

The dress was a quick decision as well. I found a gorgeous dress that would still be in style today if I had purchased it. It was a simple sheath dress with a removable gathered over skirt that was full and had a slight train. Unfortunately, it would be months before it could be delivered in my size. So I went to a rental store and chose a dress. I was the first bride to wear that particular dress and it wasn’t as elegant as the first dress, but it made me feel like a bride, and that’s what’s important.

I was marrying the love of my life. Nothing else really mattered.

My mother ordered the invitations, as I was at work and called me to get the correct spelling of the grooms name. My co-workers thought that was hilarious as I spelled out the eleven letters that made up his definitely French surname. Mother always had to check the spelling when she wrote me as it was too hard for her to remember. I always have to spell it out for our local librarians when I check out a book, as they can’t remember how to spell it either. LOL

We had a small reception at the house. And that was it.

We left to go to Knott’s Berry Farm for the day and stayed at a motel that night before returning home the next day to pack for our journey East.

Our journey into married life began and still continues.

Thinking of the decision to get married, to me, depends on whether the two people involved want to stay together, through everything. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health…

In The Vow, the couple are in the third category. Ann has been diagnosed with breast cancer and has come home…yet, before she could discuss her cancer with her mother, she is thrown out of the house again, like she was ten years earlier. Clay, her boyfriend of ten years ago, witnesses this rejection and offers her a place to stay. Ann doesn’t know if she should stay or leave. She did see him kiss her sister ten years ago…

This is one of the books featured in Weddings on Main Street.

Pepper Phillips is a Northwestern girl who managed to get located to the deep South and is learning all the fun things you can do with duck tape.