So, for a long time I’ve been wanting to talk about my wedding. I know what you’re thinking: “But Purps, you talk about your wedding ALL the TIME!” This is true. I really like talking about my wedding. I do so whenever I get the chance, as I’m sure a lot of newlyweds tend to do. Or at least newlywed women. I feel like guys have few compulsions to share about what flowers were used or where they got their tux. Anyway, the thing about weddings is when you’re in them they’re overwhelming and you have no time to blog about it and when it’s over you’re so exhausted you don’t want to even think about it for a couple weeks. So I’ve been wanting to blog about my wedding for six months and equally not wanting to blog about it at the same time. I think, however, that I’ve finally come to a place where I am ready to blog about my wedding experience.
The next thing is, it would take forever to blog about it all at once. As anyone who has ever been closely involved in a wedding knows, it is a lot of work over too much time, culminating in a day packed with too much stimulation for one person to handle all at once, but you get a cool spouse out of the deal so it’s worth it. So, yeah, I’ve decided to break it up into little chunks, as usual, and give it to you over the next like week or so. If you get sick of it and want to wander off, that’s cool. I don’t blame you. Just be sure to come back when the coast is clear.
Since I moved to a new site, those of you who are new haven’t heard my engagement story yet. I discovered about three weeks before my wedding that I still really like to tell it. But of course after like the fourth month of being engaged no one asks about it anymore. All your friends and family have heard it and have moved on, even if you still think it’s the greatest thing. And I do still think it’s the greatest thing. So I’m going to share it with you and you can feel free to skip it if you’ve heard this one before.
When my husband and I were first dating he told me about his great-great grandmothers ring. Why? Because we went to Geneva and if you’re in a relationship at Geneva you have a 80% chance of getting engaged before the end of senior year or shortly there after. So with all the engagements around us, rings were just a natural topic to pop up. I really like vintage things and I may have mentioned the thought that an heirloom ring would be ideal. So when he said that he, or rather his mom, had such a ring, I knew it would one day be mine. That sounds so devious in print, but it’s true. I really hoped that he would propose with that ring someday, you know, a few years from then.
Anyway, time progresses as it does and after we hit the one year mark and had been talking about getting married maybe the following summer and trying to calculate how long we wanted our engagement to be (I already had a date picked out so it was just a matter of setting the proposal at a reasonable distance from said date) I was starting to get impatient. I knew October was the most reasonable time to get engaged for a short-ish engagement and a pretty fall setting, which I thought would be so romantic, but was soooo far away. I really wanted to see the ring and it’s so hard to wait when you know it’s coming. We were getting married the following summer so we might as well have been engaged. Also, my husband is not a very good liar. And I unwittingly put him in a position to keep information from me, which tipped me off that he had taken the ring to get sized and may have picked it up. I also learned what I call errands he calls chores.
It was the beginning of August and the summer was coming slowly to a close and my family was going up to the family cabin for the weekend, bringing boyfriends along for the first time ever. The cabin was a big part of my childhood summers. My cousins and I would spend hours playing on the big rocks out in the woods past Oak Lane. I thought this would be a great place to propose, but Logan wouldn’t think of it. It has no sentimental value to him. So we go up and hang out and take our “101 Questions to Ask Before Getting Engaged” book out to the high point in Oak Lane to sit and talk and swat at bugs. I was using a fortune cookie fortune as a book marker that said something along the lines of “you will soon receive a great prize.” I’d gotten it a week or so before and thought it might be accurate, for once. Logan commented on how it would have been a good time to propose, jokingly, I thought, and told me lots of wonderful things about how thankful he was about our relationship and how God and grown us together and how much he loved me and I almost thought he was going to ask me right then and there, except I knew he didn’t have a ring on him. I would have noticed, right?
So we went back and enjoyed the rest of our weekend and on Sunday as we’re cleaning up he says to me, “When we get back, why don’t we go to the park and do some more devotions, since it’s such a nice day.” And I’m thinking, Sure! Why not? It’s lovely out, we can sit on the patio and read our book before going to evening service. And then he starts fidgeting. My husband is an introvert and we had just had a conversation about how extended social interaction drains his energy and he’d just spent a whole weekend with my family, which he was still getting used to and had to be on his best behavior for. So when he answered my inquiry about his discomfort with “it’s been a long weekend” I believed him. Until he said, “Let’s go to Buttermilk Falls.”
For those of you who didn’t go to Geneva or grow up in Beaver County, Buttermilk Falls is a little nature park a few miles up the road from the college. It’s not very big but it’s got a nice waterfall and a pool at the bottom you can swim in and a trail to walk around and it’s quite lovely. In a conversation with my sister about where I’d like to be proposed to I had told her that Buttermilk Falls would be a good spot, or McConnell’s Mill; a bigger nature park with lots of trails and a much bigger river. She hadn’t told Logan, and I knew she wouldn’t, but of course there was that suspicion. But no, we’d been saying we wanted to go to the Falls all summer and it was such a nice day and it was closer to the friends we were meeting up with before church. Everything about it made sense from a not-being-proposed-to standpoint but of course my brain was screaming “IT’S HAPPENING!”

So I tried not to think about it all the way home, pretending to sleep on my then boyfriend’s shoulder. When we got home and my sister was ready to jump in the shower my mom put in that “Maybe Bekah should go first.” I hadn’t even thought about showering. What was I going to wear? Would it give away that I knew if I dressed up a little? But I didn’t know. Not for sure. Would I look dumb dressing up to not get proposed to? I decided on jeans and a nice shirt that he hadn’t seen before, but I’d had forever, as a compromise. And I texted my best friend because I had to tell somebody even it if it wasn’t actually happening.
So I took the fastest shower I’ve ever taken in my life and we drive out to Buttermilk Falls where everyone is out getting engagement pictures and swimming with their babies. He fumbled in the car and comes around with a square-ishness in his pocket. Not terribly obvious, but I’m looking for it. We find a nice little spot under a train bridge and sit on a convenient rock. I get the book out, but I’m not interested in the book. He’s talking about much the same stuff he had the day before and how he’s really enjoyed this past year and is looking forward to the year ahead and I’m not really listening because he’s fumbling with his pocket. His hand is in his pocket. He gives up and says “Oh, and uh, there was something I wanted to ask you.” And for a moment I think there was really something he forgot to ask and wonder what it could be when he’s supposed to be… ooooh. As he says my name and I say yes, and he says “Would you” and I say yes, and he asks me to marry him and I keep saying yes over and over as he opens the box and I see the ring for the first time.

This is it! Isn’t it beautiful?
I learned afterward that he had planned to propose that Saturday when we went out to Oak Lane, but had left the ring in his dashboard compartment, having been late meeting us and then switching cars, he didn’t realize it was still there until we were half an hour out. He did, however, take advantage of me sleeping in that Saturday to ask my parents permission to marry me. I still think it’s funny that his back up plan turned out to be one of my ideal scenarios.
So there you have it; our engagement story. I hope you’ve enjoyed it for all it’s long-winded rambliness. You can be sure there’s more long rambly weddingy stories to come.