A Rural Wedding

The site of the wedding I attended in Walcott, Iowa.  Photo by J. Berta.

Greetings All:

I had a wonderful experience recently.  My family and I were invited to a rural wedding in Walcott, Iowa.  For those of you who are not local, Walcott is a farming community not far from where we live.  Dawn, my wife, is a Chiropractor.  One of her patients was kind enough to invite her to her wedding.  Simply put, we had a great time.

I love weddings.  I have had the good fortune to attend ones of all degrees of formality.  I'd be a liar and a hypocrite to say I don't enjoy dressing up, I do.  Dawn and I make it a point to do at least a couple of formal events a year.

Still, I am a t-shirt/shorts and or jeans/sweatshirt kind of guy, climate directing.  So when I heard this was a "come comfortable, it's summer after all" wedding, I was all in.  

We arrived at the reception site and then were whisked by hay rack to the ceremony site at an actual, authentic farm.  The opening photo is where the ceremony was held.  What a gorgeous backdrop for an amazing ceremony.

 

Dawn, Cassie & Carly on the hay rack awaiting the tracker ride to the ceremony.  Photo by J. Berta.

As we arrived, there were two musicians, one playing a guitar, the other singing.  Prior to the ceremony, children ran, spreading their laughter with all of us.  I was pleased to see my old friend John perform the ceremony.  He's a lawyer by training and performed his task with a reverence worthy of any judge or man of the cloth.

The bride wore a lovely white gown.  There were no attendants, just the two of them.  Or, perhaps another way to look at it is this:  All of us were in the wedding party.  That is the feel this event had to it. 

I do not believe that a wedding has to be formal to be meaningful. This was a simple, yet wonderfully authentic affair and I was glad to be a guest at it.

We returned to the reception site and feasted on traditional Iowa fare.  In the back of an old pick up truck was plenty of beer.  The band, after being introduced by the bride, rocked the crowd well into the night.  We declined to dance the night away, yet still had a ton of fun.

I'll wrap up this post returning to my opening comments about the rural setting of this wedding.  While I live in Iowa, it is in a city.  Well, not a city in the sense of a New York or Chicago.  More like one of their suburbs with less traffic.  Yet everything is paved and and modern.  

Where this wedding was held was clearly out of the city.  It was where pavement gives way to gravel and dirt roads.  Where office buildings and strip malls are replaced by barns and farm houses.  As we rode (by hay rack) to the ceremony, we were surrounded by endless ears of corn.  They were straight and green, stretching towards the sky.  Corn is one of the things that Iowa is best known for.  It is food.  Food is life.  Without farms, there is no food, no life.  Farms are where soil and seed become one to create something greater than the sum of their parts.  

In many ways, it is similar to a wedding.  So where better to have a wedding than on a farm?  Where better indeed?

At the reception area there were a series of vintage trackers.  It was a great backdrop for photos.  Some could not resist the temptation to pose on them.  And, yes, I was one of them.
 

Your author hanging out on the tracker before the ceremony.  Photo by J. Berta.

They don't have this as a backdrop at the Hamptons, I'll assure you of that!

So here's to this wonderful rural wedding and hearty congrats to the bride and groom.  Thanks for letting us be a part of your special day in a most special background.

Be well my friends,
Jeno