Sunflower Nuptials(Deborah Craig) No one gets married in August here in the Gulf South. Never, ever. Not in New Orleans or Houston or Tampa. The heat and humidity are stupefying. It is hurricane season, and the Weather Channel is warily observed non-stop by residents until after Labor Day. Everyone has a story of canceled events, no-shows, and lost deposits due to the weather and approaching storms. People who are able to leave town for somewhere cooler to the North-- do-- and those who cannot are busy getting their kids ready for the first day of school. And the rest of us pray October comes quickly. Getting married here in August is worse than getting married during football season. You just don’t do it.
Yet, here I am, after work from my job at the Houston Chronicle, in my cluttered apartment, surrounded by packing boxes, with three weeks and $843 to plan and execute our wedding. The event I’ve dreamed of since I was ten. The wedding Dale and I had planned for next March in my hometown of New Orleans, during azalea season, complete with a second line at the reception.
But Dale landed a full-professorship in economics after adjunct teaching at three universities, struggling just to live and pay bills, for over three years. And since over 75% of all university instructors are adjunct, we were elated at this realization of a dream. But he has to report in three weeks. To Fort Hays State University in Kansas, a school I’ve ever heard of in a state I’ve never been to. I remember when he flew out there for the interview in June, and telling me the place was so remote, that after the flight to Denver, he had to take a puddle jumper to Hays, Kansas. The town was too far away to rent a car and drive. And now it would be home for both of us. A home, where he insisted, he should begin as a married professor. After some debate, I was convinced of this necessity: How we would not have the time or money to fly to New Orleans in March for a wedding; how another colleague in the economics department arranged a duplex rental for us, walking distance from campus.
So after one last try, and even a suggestion that we simply fly to Vegas for the weekend and get married, (which was met with horrified chastisement by my mother and his parents,) I find myself sitting here, determining ways to have an elegant, simple wedding for 50 people on $834-- my wedding savings so far. Neither my widowed mother nor his retired parents can afford to give us funds for a wedding, and I wasn’t going to ask them for any help. After all, I’ve been living in Houston and on my own for four years now. I decided that not only would I pull this off, but I would begin a blog on the Chronicle’s Lifestyle webpage (after consulting with my editor) on “The $800 Wedding—Planned in three weeks.”
I am not a very practical person. So this blog will either be impossible or ridiculous, or incredibly, laughably, dollar-store cheap. Practicality and frugality was Dale’s forte, not mine. When I interviewed him two years ago on the feature about income disparity in the US, I was amazed at his plain explanations and solutions for my questions; his passion, his zeal for his research and subject area, and his sincerity, relaxed poise, and honesty. The more we talked, and later dated, the more I realized he was such a complement to my fun-seeking, quirky, spontaneous, New Orleans way of living. He grounded me. And I gave him, he said, a sense of fun and joie de vivre. After six months of dating, still in the complete rapture and newness of giddy love, he proposed marriage and I accepted. Both our families were delighted. We went to New Orleans to see mine. They loved him. Then we drove to Shreveport to meet his. They loved me.
And now yesterday’s news of his full-time associate professorship, and the start of my blog. My editor loved the idea, and I am off and running, cringing about the reality of how impossible or downright awful this will actually be. At least the wedding will be small. The guest list of fifty would nicely cover our immediate families from Louisiana and friends and colleagues here in Houston.
First entry in blog: “Challenge #1: Finding a venue.” Ok, on my budget, it will have to be free. Free venues: Public parks? Not in August. A municipal hall? Not on a Saturday. A friend’s house? All my friends have apartments. Every single one. A church? Fellowship hall of the local Methodist church I attend in an old Houston neighborhood: booked for Saturday, August 22. Try another church? Not comfortable with that, I told my pastor. Next step: Go to the library to check out books for ideas on wedding venues. (Maybe the manager of the local Home Depot would allow us to have a wedding in the garden section? Read about it once on Facebook. Except that here they stay open until 10 pm. A wedding at midnight was a thought…. )
“What are you looking through?” whispers my next-door apartment neighbor and good friend Allie, a librarian at the branch library I frequent between assignments for the paper. I collected all the brides’ planning books from the stacks and am leafing through them.
“Trying to find ideas for a free venue for the wedding. Say, do you know when Jack’s Garden Center closes on a Saturday?” I ask, skimming through another page of glossy Martha Stewart too-perfect table settings.
“For how many again?” asks Allie, already looking as though she was contemplating several options.
“Fifty guests,” I reply, “More or less.”
Well, there’s museums, art galleries, and the botanical garden at Westland Park, she muses, “They do cost; but only $200, maybe?”
“You’ve not read my blog?” I counter. “No can do. $843 has to cover everything.”
“Ok…the junior high across from our apartment complex has a cafeteria. I went to a shower there for a teacher who is on the faculty, and I can ask her to reserve…”
“No thanks,” I interrupt. “I’m desperate, but… I want a wedding that won’t smell and remind everyone of the eighth grade….”
“$843? That’s it? Including a dress?”
“Yup. Including a dress”, feeling very discouraged at what will be the cheapest wedding of all time, picturing a white beach dress from Macy’s.
“People have weddings most anywhere now…you wouldn’t believe some of the….” Then Allie stops, mouth open, looking around.
“What? “ I whisper as she looked all around us.
“The Historical Society had a tea here last Sunday. They had everything set up here in the mezzanine.” She points to the large marble floor space between the desks and the stacks, punctuated by a few massive wooden reading tables. “And over to the right there’s a kitchen and a reception room. And the reception room has at least 30 chairs…“
My heart is pounding. What could be a more perfect location for a wedding between an academic and a bibliophile than in a library? I call Dale.
“That is the most incredible idea! Please get Allie to work it out!” He sounds as hopeful and excited as I.
“How much is it to rent?” Not wanting to let go of the idea, even if it meant taking out a dreaded credit card.
“Nothing. It’s free to use the library after closing, if you’re a civic group. But I’m the associate librarian. I’ll clear it with the system, and if you could make a small donation? It’ll be okay, especially if I take responsibility. Want to see the reception room?”
The next night, I am happily printing our invitations on parchment paper from a DYI kit, thinking about my wonderful friend Allie, how I gushed thank you’s between several hugs in front of bemused library patrons. I look at my diagram of the ceremony and reception space and am bursting with anticipation: Perfect venue, enough space, and a $50 donation to the library that Allie will give in our names as a wedding gift to us. I mail the invitations very early in the morning, leaving exactly three weeks between receipt of them and the wedding.
The next day’s blog: Dress and wedding clothes. Three groomsmen for Dale, (his two brothers and his best friend,) three maids for me, (My sister Rachel, Allie, and best friend from New Orleans, Jennifer, Maid of Honor.) The guys will wear dark grey suits, which they already own, with Dale in a black dress suit he’s had for years. All I have to get is matching ties and boutonnieres---easy enough. Now to shop for my dress and three bridesmaids’ dresses, each in their sizes.
I search the city’s best thrift stores, consignments shops, closeout sales, and, disappointed at finding nothing, I finally search online on the local Craigslist. Still nothing. Ebay would take too long, so scratch it off. Exhausted, I make plans to search again tomorrow, all day. A package with the mail arrives for me the next morning, as I’m leaving. It’s from Jennifer. “Hey!” The note reads:
“If you don’t like these, please give to local thrift shop. I know time and money are tight. My cousin offered to sell these to me. Beaucoup cheap. Rachel and I have two of the bridesmaid dresses. Perfect fit. The one in the box is for Allie. And after knowing you since second grade and all the homecoming and prom gowns you’ve picked out with me, I think I know your taste---Love you, and see you soon! Excited!---Jenny”
Opening the box, I push aside the tissue paper and pull up a white lace strapless gown that is elegant, simple, intricately detailed and classic. Jenny knows me so well. My eyes are blurry with tears as I am overwhelmed at her thoughtfulness, generosity, and sweetness. I love it. Even better, it is a perfect fit. No alterations needed. The dress loves me! I’m grateful to cousins who put their wedding clothes and accessories up for sale for other brides to enjoy. The grass green bridesmaid dress is another story, but this $843 bride cannot afford to be picky. It’s a simple strapless taffeta a-line, beautifully made, just loud and very “green” in color. I’ll just find yellow sashes for all three to tone it down. Back to the consignment store for a veil and jewelry, order shoes online, and Challenge number 2 is marked off. I call Jenny that evening to tell her simply how wonderful she is, and that I love having her as my best friend.
$722 left. My blog is getting several hits, nearly two hundred in only four days. Challenge #3. Finding a videographer and a photographer. Professional studios are out: $500 to over $2,500 for a complete package. Yikes. I have a professional camera from the paper. Maybe I could give it to my sixteen year-old brother for pictures. No….I’m asking for epic failure. Do any of my friends do photography for a hobby? Do any of Dale’s friends do photography? Wait a minute. Some of the best photography ever taken has been in magazines and newspapers. Why not ask another reporter at the paper to take pictures and another to video it for say, $100 bucks each? The next day, a college intern in Lifestyles and her friend, who is starting her own event planning company, replies to my ad I had placed in the newsroom bulletin board. Two enthusiastic college seniors, gushing over my blog, promising to do a superb job. Then Elise, the intern, shows me pics of the high school senior portraits she’s done: Finished, simple, classic photos, each student looking enhanced but true to him/herself. They’re hired.
$522 left. Challenge #3: Food, beverages and cake. When you’re from New Orleans, eating and good food are synonymous with living and breathing. People live to eat. And they come to weddings to eat and drink, of course, after their love and support for the bridal couple. So with $522, I decide on what any other New Orleanian does when confronted with preparing good food on very little money: I will cook jambalaya and gumbo, with fresh seafood, if I can afford it, and if not, with chicken and sausage. That evening I call my mom for the family recipes for both dishes, as I never bothered to find out how it was cooked—I might by the only female in my family’s history not interested in cooking.
“You don’t have to worry about that. Your aunts and I are cooking big pans of it. Along with Chicken Florentine and shrimp pasta. We’ll have big catering pans of it. Frozen. Just make sure your fridge is empty so we can fit them all in-- and we’ll heat them the morning of the wedding. You just worry about the cake, rolls and salad. Oh, and your uncles are bringing crates of wine, champagne and good beer.”
And before I could protest that it was too much, too generous of them, Mom was telling me to stop crying; it was the least she and my Nanny (godmother) and aunties could do for the wedding. My mom and her three sisters---with whom I had grown up, always convened and marshalled family forces together to contend with sickness, funerals, hurricanes, holidays, baptisms, and weddings, with amazing aplomb and efficiency.
So on my blog I post: “Wedding entrees and beverages: gifts from family.” And with $522, I go about the next challenge: tableware, décor, groom’s ring, music. Since I need to complement the grassy greenness of the bridesmaid dresses, the wedding “colors” have evolved: green and pale gold. Allie and I hit the thrift stores again, and buy several old white flat sheets, then a few new ones from dollar stores. Enough for five tables of ten guests each. At the apartment basement laundry room (as we pray no one comes in and discovers what we are doing,) we pour yellow saffron fabric dye into two of the machines full of sheets, which turn them to a pale golden yellow. After drying, they’re a bit lighter than I wanted, but will do nicely.
Since we cannot use open flame candles in the library, I opt for the battery operated tea lights at the crafts store. The next Saturday, we hit the yard sales, thrift shops and flea markets again for tall glasses to use as holders for the tea lights, and some frosted, some with cut-patterns-- enough of a variety to look vintage, without looking like a mismatch. Then, I decide to make the biggest splurge of the wedding. I go to the Dollar Mart, (where everything is a dollar) and buy 50 pressed clear glass dinner plates, then 50 knives, forks and spoons at 50 cents each. While all the clerks in the store are helping me box my stash, I decide on my last splurge of 25 glass beer mugs and 25 small wine-or-water-or-punch goblets at a S1 each. Then 25 plain olive green loose-woven cotton dish towels I will cut in half and sew into cloth napkins. Total: $200 plus tax. Do I feel guilty? No. I am adamantly opposed to paper plates and cups. They’re for picnics. Not weddings. Even for a pauper’s wedding like mine. Our wedding will be simple, but it will be elegant.
“Where do you suppose you’re going to store and pack all these when the wedding’s over?” growls Dale, as he looks over my small restaurant stock piled against the wall .
“Ten place settings for us, ten for Jennifer—which is her bridesmaid gift from me, and the other place settings for my aunts as a thank you for cooking.”
“They have their own dishes...”
“Their single, young adult kids do not. Believe me, they’ll take them and put them to good use with my fifteen cousins.”
End of splurge discussion.
“$219 left,” I blog the next and final week before W-Day. Every one of the 51 guests I have invited accepted. And now I search for Dale’s ring. I want it in white 14K gold—simple and strong—like him. Allie and I make a list of all the jewelry consignment shops the next Saturday. She also tries to talk me into going to a few pawn shops, but that’s a line I won’t cross. Never been in one. They scare me. I should be able to find a ring for Dale without a pawn shop.
And I do. At the Victorian Lady, an antiques store near the Rice University campus—a thick silver band, with a deep patina and masculine beauty. I then go to a jeweler nearby to have it engraved. I’m already in my car, still gazing at how beautiful it is while Allie asks me how much I have left.
“ The ring was $150, so $69 left….and the next thing on my list….music. A DJ, maybe?”
“Easy. Don’t need a DJ. Just take your ipod. Get a good playlist going, and put it in one of those amp-speaker combos with an ipod dock. I’ll be in charge of your reception music and the announcements. Oh, and my brother has a rotating disco ball. I’ll get it for Saturday. “
And before I realize it, I am home trying out my new “DJ Boomer Party Blaster” (speaker amp with dock from the high-tech store) for $50 with my favorite tracks on my ipod. Great sound, just enough for the wedding space. Ta-dah! With about $18 left, I will buy cake mixes to bake our own wedding cupcakes tiers. I am a miracle worker! A smart, simple, elegant wedding for approximately $800!
That night, with Dale and Allie, I do a mock set up of the wedding table with my white sheets-turned pale gold tablecloths, dishware, candles, and my dishtowel-turned green napkins. I’m more than pleased, but beginning to think something is missing….
“What about flowers?” asks Allie.
“Flowers?’ as I stop, go blank, and weakly ask in a hushed panic.
“Yeah, flowers—bouquets for you and us. The tables…”
I gasp in unbelieving shock. How in the world did I not put that on my list? I will never make any list again without someone else checking it for a critically important item that might be missing----like flowers for a wedding. Me, the savvy lifestyles journalist and blogger who forgot to budget money for flowers for her own wedding! I marvel at my own hubris, carelessness, and sheer stupidity. Only I could have gone off and running without thinking of flowers. I’m the world’s biggest bride-fail.
“Take back all the dishes and things to the Dollar Mart. Get your money back.” says Dale, assertively.
“No..”
“Then take back my ring. I don’t need one. We can get one later on.”
“No…” I say. And I start to cry…
The next day at work, while I count another $36 at my lunch break from scrounging a piggy bank and couch money to buy some daisies at Winn Dixie, (while considering a stealth attack on some brown-eyed Susans at the exit ramp by I-10), I figure out what to say on my blog. Admit my stupidity and failure. And continue scrounging for flowers. Maybe I could call a few funeral homes to see if anyone’s left behind their gladiolas or peace lilies. Then Dale calls.
“Hey…the department secretary at UH has a weekend home north of here in Ludlow.”
“For our wedding night?”
“Well, no, but that’s good idea---she has a one-acre field full of cutting flowers that she says we’re welcome to go up and cut as many as we need for the wedding…”
I’m ready to celebrate in a happy dance. “Cutting flowers?” As I envision dahlias, peonies, and hyacinths.
”Yeah...they’re sunflowers. Just all sunflowers…but lots of them. We’ll go up there tonight. I’ll pick you up at 4:30.”
Sunflowers? As in The Wizard of Oz? Lil’ Abner? A 1950s kitchen? Daycare Center murals? Tacky country weddings? Sunflowers aren’t cool. Aren’t delicate. Aren’t even very pretty. They’re bird food. More big brown plates for birds than they are flowers! Sunflowers aren’t me. This is my wedding. This is cruel.
I stare at my $36 in cash along with my $18 left in my budget—I could get some decent flowers for about $55, right? Winn Dixie? Fake ones at the Dollar Store, maybe? Only one thing worse than paper plates---and that’s fake flowers. I’m a journalist, and a bride, and I’m broke, marrying someone who also has very little money from a family with very little. It’ll be okay, I tell myself. If I use a credit card or borrow money, though, I’ll destroy the integrity of my blog, and incur my impoverished future husband’s wrath. And I will not ask my mom to spend more money when she cannot afford it. So I borrow two garden shears from the one of the sports editors who had them in his car with some lawn equipment. I will cut the sunflowers. I will take the sunflowers. Gratefully. It’ll look like Honey Boo-Boo’s wedding in Dogpatch. But I’ll have to endure it.
It is nearly 6:30 when we arrive to Mrs. Danley’s weekend home in Ludlow and the sky and hills are bathed in a wonderful golden light. The heat has abated, and she takes us to the back of the house where I see them---a large swath of green stalks going as far as the distant tree line, with fringed their bonnets of yellow petals on brown faces, titled up to the sun like expectant children. And they’re huge, 3 to 4 feet tall. One flower could be an entire bouquet.
And so we get to work. Sliding out our several grocery store- oblong boxes from my car, we wade in this small green sea as birds annoyingly flutter up and out of the field, squawking indignantly.
“Cut them with about 16 to 24 inches for stems,” calls out Dale, “or the flowers will be too heavy and droop down.” I try to find the ones that are a bit smaller than the ones with deep brown centers the size of dinner plates, and discover, thankfully, there are masses of smaller sunflowers. But I am still disappointed having to settle for these homely homespun flowers, sulking as I cut away.
As we fill up the last two of our 8 boxes, rinsing the flowers carefully of bugs and debris, I try to find something I like about them: saturated safflower color of the petals, and the fact that the stems and leaves are the same green of the bridesmaid dresses. Maybe they won’t look so corny after all. Maybe the smallest ones will make handsome bouquets.
The day before the wedding: With the remaining $55, instead of baking wedding cupcakes, I buy five fresh fancy layer cakes from Kroger’s--a cake for each table, including ours. I decorate each cake with yellow Gerber daisies, also from Kroger’s, and place two diminutive Lladro doves I’ve had for years on our cake. Done. Instant wedding cake. In five small cakes. I buy 50 wildflower seed packets from Home Depot for wedding favors, and will tie parchment paper left over from the invitations that I’ve made into tags, wrapping and tying each packet with bright yellow ribbon. Dale buys rolls, butter and large salad bags, as my budget is down to 0.
The night before the wedding, as I am finishing the favors, and my mom and aunts work on the bouquets, I smile, thinking about the evening’s wonderful rehearsal party, given by Dale’s parents at a waterside restaurant in Houston. I also think about last night’s serendipity when Dale and I stopped at a diner on the way home from gathering the sunflowers. In the corner from our booth of Wade’s Quickstop/Café, against a wall was a crate of vintage milk bottles. Their tall, plain, comely glass beauty reminded me of our sunflowers….and impulsively I was up from my seat asking Wade behind the counter if I could purchase them.
“You want dem ol’ milk bottles? What fer?” He chuckles. I explain to him I’m getting married on Saturday, and I’d like them for sunflower vases.
“Take ‘em, then. As a weddin’ present… and congratulations.”
“Ok, what do you think, Dawlin’?” My aunt nudges me out of my reverie. And before me is my bridal bouquet: a round ball of perfect small sunflowers in varying shades of sunshine—from gold to the color of lemons. The stems are wrapped with green and gold silk ribbons, dotted with seed pearls. These homely farm flowers are transformed. The bouquet is simple, fresh, honest, and startlingly exquisite. “Auntie, it’s gorgeous,” as I hug her.
Wedding day. An hour before the wedding, and it’s raining torrentially outside in sheets, like only August’s hurricane season in the late afternoon can deliver. So glad we came here to the library earlier for me to get ready in the librarians’ lounge. My bridesmaids are so elegant, so pert, so poised. Their green dresses with the yellow sashes and sunflower bouquets in this gray afternoon burst with a light all their own. The colors are in brilliant harmony. I am overtaken at how perfectly the sunflowers complete their dresses.
I stroll outside of the lounge for one last look at our library-turned wedding palace. And it looks like a golden summer afternoon. As though defying the drenching, noisy gray outside, the sunflowers’ brown faces with sunny petals stand in their serene glass milk bottles, amid the flickering tea lights, and the whole room hums and glows with the smells of summer and sun and deep blue skies. No other flower, I think, could do this so brilliantly, so happily. And they are everywhere. My mom and her aunts worked magic with every single flower we had gathered. There’s even a sunflower arch, made from bamboo poles bought at Home Depot by one of my uncles, draped with netting and lights. I am awed.
The aroma from the pans with the Bunsen burners beneath them wafts to me, and I gaze at my simple, charming tables with their glass plates catching light from the flickering tea lights, crowned with straight rows of glass milk bottles with jubilant sunflowers. The entire space is a celebration of a serene summer afternoon, despite the torrential rain and darkness at the large windows. My mom comes to my side and I squeeze her hand, then hug her. We are both thinking of Daddy. We miss him so. His presence is lovingly honored today with his framed picture at a special table. And Mom will be walking me down the aisle, between two fiction book stacks, then to the altar. The college music majors (Dale had procured as a surprise for me) begin tuning their instruments, a flute and a dulcimer, for the ceremony …
I am dancing with my husband. We are ensconced in serene joy and contentment. The wedding has been intimate, beautiful, poignant, funny, fun. From the family food to the supermarket bakery cakes to the ipod “DJ. Party Blaster”, manned with exceptional skill by Allie, to the champagne, beer and wine, served with true bartender mastery by Dale’s two brothers, it has been sublime. My aunts all have their shoes off and are laughing at one of my uncle’s jokes. My sister is dancing with one of Dale’s colleagues, deep in serious conversation.
“Are you happy with the way everything turned out?” Dales whispers in my ear.
“More than I ever dreamed. This has been perfect.” And I muse for a moment if the more expensive wedding in March would’ve been any better than this. How could it be? The $843 wedding was not bought with dollars and cents. It was put together by love: from our families, our friends. Their gifts of love, not just the food, clothes and drinks, created the perfect day, a few perfect hours of the wedding I’ve always imagined mine to be: finding the love of my life and being surrounded by those I love. And we hug the university secretary Mrs. Danley, whom we invited to the wedding as a thankful gesture, for her gift of a field full of brilliant, bold, happy sunflowers.
Our cross country honeymoon caravan trek, car driven by me, rental truck driven by Dale, is nearing its four –day end as we arrive in southwest Kansas and drive to the address of the duplex just north of the university campus. A “welcome newlyweds and newcomers” sign is on the spruce green front door of a gray-shingled duplex house with white shutters. Dale procures the key from a birdhouse on a pole in the side yard, and giggling, picks me up to carry me inside. We stroll through a few empty musty-smelling rooms, wooden floors creaking, until I come to the kitchen’s back door. I open it to the back yard, and both of us at once begin to laugh. There, beyond the clothesline, is a field of huge sunflowers, gently swaying beneath a sky that is startlingly blue. They are welcoming us. These stalwart beauties, giving their centers for bird food and their happy faces to the world, saying, “You’re home.”

---