Rural wedding as things should be

The first weekend of last September we left the city and went to real America, a place where things still are as they ought to be. The afternoon of Sean and Andee Thurston’s wedding was warm – golden, some would say.

The wedding place was a St. Maries farmhouse, the groom’s ancestral home. His father’s family has lived there more than 50 years. His grandmother died there when an earlier version of the home burned. His grandfather, the town doctor, died a Good Samaritan helping someone else stranded on a roadside not far from here. One of the Samaritan’s sons became the town doctor. So, this pleasant place on the St. Maries River was already hallowed in a way, steeped in honesty and courage.

The road sloped gently down toward the house, cars parked in the pasture. From a high bough of a large tree hung a long rope swing with a board seat. It was pulled and tied against the tree to make way for the grooms and brides families, each on a side to walk past the tree to the hedge in front where a young minister led the vows. The Good Samaritan had delivered the young pastor’s wife.

In these settings observers are sometimes given to hyperbole, but in this instance to say the groom was handsome and the bride beautiful is probably not enough. They seemed to me to be America’s promise, what you can count on, how you’d want to be if this was your September day.

Andee and Sean lived in different rural school districts in southeast Washington and were just very good friends who went to prom their junior year. “We had so much fun together our junior year,” Sean recalls, “that we made a standing date to do it again our senior year.”

Andee, pretty and smart, was an athlete in school and excelled in just about everything. Sean was described as intelligent, a great friend and a young man who could do and has done whatever he set his mind to. They went separate ways after high school. Somehow 10 years later, there they were on the patio in back of the Thurston family home, married and conveying their thanks to a truly appreciative audience.

In front of the crowd he seemed a little nervous and turned the microphone over to her. She accepted the mike, telling us this is how it is going to be anyway. She did the talking. From her description you would have wanted her sisters to be your sisters. She acknowledged that while this was their wedding day it also was a connection of the Garfield-Palouse and St. John-Endicott communities. Their families had a “workday” to get the place ready for the wedding. I asked if that was part of the wedding tradition and was told, “No, it is just something we wanted to do.”

If there were cell phones around, I didn’t hear them. There were happy children, well dressed and well behaved, respectful of the occasion. I had no sense anyone around me was there out of duty. They all seemed happy to be among 300 people who wanted and were given the privilege of being there.

There was no mashing the wedding cake into the groom’s face. The garter toss was not a maniac scramble. The dancing was celebratory. No one fell or tripped. We stayed several hours, not anxious to leave this part of America where people and things still are as they ought to be.