Wedding Shoes and Honoring Women!

One of the things that impressed me the most at the wedding was that Kelsey, her mother, Linda, and her sister, Kristen, were able to walk down a hill to the altar in high heels.  These are “Can Do Women”!  Women who can milk cows, make cheese, raise chickens-bantams and heirlooms, pigs and those difficult vegetables, ride horses along beaches, coordinate and design as well as put up a whole wedding like any of the best Long Island Wedding Planners, not break out in a sweat for 6 months and still not fall down a hill.  I am totally in awe. I did mention before that Linda also sewed the wedding dress that Kelsey designed with special lace. I did get one photo of Linda looking a little crazy, but won’t share that with anyone because Pat has one of me after 44 hours of labor with Ben before I gave up and said “take him out through my mouth I don’t care”-the C section followed and Pat crying his eyes out while singing a song he doesn’t remember.  The nurses came to me the next day and ask if my husband was alright.  I said, “What? I am the one who went through the 44 hours of Ben trying to get out”. 

So in this blog, I am honoring Linda and Kelsey. My Momma, Shirley and Pat’s Momma, Sarah, the grandmothers and great grandmothers who were also “Can Do Women” who more or less raised their children alone. I am also honoring all those “Can Do Women” I know or have known like Carol Collins. (I miss her so and how those 3 named women would have so loved to see their Ben married.) I honor all those women who go to work each day and come home to then take care of their children.  When they told me back in the 60s I could do anything I wanted to believe them, but now I know we are all part of heredity, mix of the genes, and places and times. And we can only do the best we can.  Sometimes there is a cost, a cost we pay and not understand until we are older. My independent mother and Pat’s independent mother knew about the costs towards the end of their lives and I am beginning to figure out now.  They were both beautiful and wonderful women who loved their children dearly.

 I just had finished for the 2^nd time called Beach Music by Pat Conroy, given to me from my friend Lee for the trip. Each chapter was a person’s history and tried to explain why their psychology, why they were the way they were, was due to their families’ history and their geographies, where they grew up and the political histories as well. I do believe being born just after WWII, and growing up in the 60s in the south, poor impacted my beliefs and how could that era not mold me in some way with the civil and women’s rights movements, Viet Nam and the assassinations of great thinkers? I hope Ben and Toby will read the book one day because I think it would explain their Daddy and myself as well.

The cameo in the wedding bouquet is of the three Graces, a gift from Ben’s great grandmother to me, a gift I never knew the value of until I saw Linda, Kelsey, Kristen and saw their faces in the three Graces. My grandmother had a history of surviving.  I don’t know her whole story, but now I believe it was fate that I received the gift over the other granddaughters as it was fated for Kelsey.

Maybe the “men” will get another blog. You will see Chuck, Kelsey’s dear father, Toby our other dear son, Pat, Ben and Alex, Kristen’s boyfriend ,in the background of the first photo as well as Jingle who will deliver her first calf in 3-4 weeks and her companion, Delbert (spelled?), a steer, destined to feed eventually the families.

 PS The only disappointing thing about Cape Disappointment where we are now is there is no cell service.  So I am doing this on the run and you will have to wait for more wedding photos later.