The Dress
I could go down the rabbit hole of all the ways that the pandemic has struck the world, but today I’m going to narrow my focus to a very personal matter: our wedding. Cole and I are both terminal procrastinators, so when Valentine’s 2019 rolled around – a full year after his proposal – and we’d planned absolutely nothing…we kicked into high gear (which for everyone else is normal gear).
By Valentine’s, 2020, we’d found our venue, selected flowers, the meal had been chosen, we’d booked a DJ, Cole had a suit tailored, and even the bridesmaid dresses had been ordered and tailored. Then the world sort of fell apart and my anxiety over not having found “the dress” yet morphed into an entirely different sort of anxiety. Obviously, 2020 forced us to postpone things.
Two years later and guess what I still haven’t managed to find? My dress.
Or at least, that was the case until recently.
I’ve narrowed it down, thanks to a converted shipping container with a great wifi connection, a laptop, and a lot of help from my friends.
Last week, I was whining to my BFFs about my dress woes when Willow had a lightbulb moment. She knows everything about everything when it comes to the local fashion scene and, it turns out, she knew a second-hand bridal boutique that was pretty much crushed by the pandemic. The shop owner, a lovely woman by the name of Iris, was forced to abandon her shop, but ended up remodeling a shipping container into a display and dressing room.
The girls all agreed that I had to be there and try things on, they told me I’d “know” when I was wearing the right dress. I felt pretty special when Iris agreed to open the unit up for me. Because of the space limitations, I asked for the dresses on my “short list”, most of which she had available, and she popped a few extras in there for me to try.
It was pretty cool. The girls joined me through zoom and, by the end of the afternoon, I had a much better idea of what I was after.
Today, being a romantic holiday and all, I thought I’d go ahead and share some romantic dress shots with you. This is just a small sampling of the ones I liked the most…and the ones that really didn’t work for me.
You can decide which are which.
Just a tip: If you can’t get the dress into the photo frame, and it stands up by itself…do yourself a favor and take a pass, no matter how good it looked on the website!
Do you have a favorite dress? Which one should I wear on the day? Which one should be set on fire and never spoken of again? Let me know in the comments below.
Oh and, happy Valentine’s Day!
