For loving days: another farm wedding!

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the bouquet I carried in our daughter's wedding, dried in l'atelier;

with my stick woman

I love a wedding, with its organza and lace, armfuls of flowers, pretty white chairs, music, sacred ceremony, and dancing, though part of me would like to avoid expensive wedding balls, if they are built on prestige and poppycock. As for Valentine's Day, I have always felt that love is for every day, and a box of chocolates, though tasty, lacks a bit by way of imagination.

But ain't love grand? Mais bien sûr! Our son is just engaged to be married to a woman he is in love with, and so are we. They will be married here on our hobby farm in August, three years to the month after his sister was married to her love here on the farm. (I posted about their wedding here.) Once again we get to mix satin and straw, quilts and lace with Queen Anne's lace, golden sunflowers and golden rings. There will be games, Mason jars with lemonade and beer, blackberries and golden raspberries, family and friends, torches and bonfires, music and laughter, kisses and tears. These are our children, grown and happy. And won't James be bouncy in his seven-month baby fat watching Unkie Pete wed his bride and new auntie? Or will he be crawling after a damselfly dressed up in gorgeously iridescent tulle wings?

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rescued glass

Since our sweet Lesley and Brian are getting married here at the farm this summer, Don and I are into the details of spiffing up the scene for the event. We both love this special excuse to tend to the farm, which will be a nice setting for the vintage-rustic-elegance Lesley envisions. Believe me, it looks a little too rustic right now, if you know what I mean.

Les has always shopped at thrift stores, and so it seems fitting to use previously used or borrowed things in the "something old" and "something borrowed" categories in the old British wedding custom for the bride:

Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue
And a silver sixpence in her shoe.

On freecycle Don found a lady who sorts clear glass at a local recycling center and couldn't bear letting these gorgeous bottles get ground up for the next piece of glass. So she gently loaded them in boxes to give away. In fact, she had a few boxes on her porch being picked up by freecyclers. (I got inspired for these photos by Artsy T at flickr. How cool!)

Lesley envisions sunflowers in these bottles on the dinner tables.

We have ordered sunflower seeds by the hundreds. Besides standing in bottles and canning jars, they will also be a backdrop for the ceremony and punctuation around the farm. I hope they'll bloom right when we need them to, but if they don't, the green leafy stalks will be pretty anyway.

In the whorl of Life that is continually recycling, sunflower seeds fall to the ground, germinate and grow into tall new plants the following season. There's really nothing new under the sun, like this tender new love, fresh and bright, that is part of a very old human cycle. How amazing!

collecting chairs

Next Farm Day will be Farm Wedding Day, when Lesley and Brian get married late summer 2009 here at the farm, yay!

Lesley is a designer, and when she and Brian started discussing the outdoor orchard 'room' being set up with chairs under a tent, she confessed how much she dislikes those white plastic folding chairs you rent. Their pocked, stained surfaces and flimsy construction got us thinking what else we could do. I agree with her, so I suggested collecting wood chairs via Freecycle. Lesley loved imagining mismatched wooden chairs lined up in rows for the wedding ceremony, then moved to tables for the reception and PAR-TAY.

We already had about 10 wood chairs at the farm we can use. (I'm still kicking myself for not picking this one up from someone's curbside last year. Duh! But I'm not the trash picker in the family, ahem, so I didn't think of it, until someone said, "why didn't you put the chair in your car?" Silent stupor. "The chair's value to me was the photograph, it never occurred to me to take it - the chair that is.") So far through Freecycle we've picked up another 18. (This feels much better than trash picking to me. I don't object to someone else trash picking, as long as I can slither down in the car and be invisible to passers-by.) Only about another 125 to go! I'm not sure the barn will hold that many though. And my goodness, are some of them HEAVY.

I asked Don how hard it would be to spray paint them all white, and he looked at me like I was possessed. I'm glad, because I think all those eclectic chairs as they are will be homey. Oh, and they'll be covered with tarps until The Day - we don't want no bat poo on dem chairs.