Tuesday, May 10, 2016

If you’re not from here, you have yet to experience a county redneck wedding.  Just about every week in the local paper, there’s a photo of some couple—he’ll look like Quasimodo…or sometimes she will—and she’s this hippo dressed up in a full, formal wedding dress—living proof that out there somewhere, there’s somebody for everyone.  And then there’ll be this long—and I mean long—article, written illiterately by the bride’s mother, probably, about how “the bride, Mabel Loo Watkins, had a china shower (at the home of Brendetha Watkins) and a linen shower (hosted by Myrtle Watkins), followed by a Tupperware shower (at the home of Gailinda Martin Watkins) and a glassware shower (hosted by the entire Baptist Women’s Auxiliary of the County), and finally, a bath and shower shower (at the home of Agnes Lee Parkerinson Spittootle, the bride’s maternal grandmother).” 

     Then they’ll have a full regalia ceremony at the Holy Mother of the Divine Light and Eternal Flame Baptist Church, followed by a reception in the Fellowship Hall, where everyone eats sausage  biscuits and warm yellow potato salad and drinks that fruit punch with the green sherbet floating in some cleaned-up thing that the cows drink out of during the week.  Then the attendees all go back home, change out of their good, church-goin’ clothes and into overalls and shirts and go shovel pig or horse manure, while the happy bride and groom drive off to Richmond for a hot week at a Motel 6—“with indoor pool and sauna”--before they come back to store all the crap she got at the china shower (at the home of Brendetha Watkins) and a linen shower (hosted by Myrtle Watkins), followed by a Tupperware shower (at the home of Gailinda Martin Watkins) and a glassware shower (hosted by the entire Baptist Women’s Auxiliary of the County) and finally, a bath and shower shower (at the home of Agnes Lee Parkerinson Spittootle, the bride’s maternal grandmother) in one of those pre-fabricated, put-it-together-yourself (some assembly required) aluminum storage sheds that they’ll erect behind their two-bedroom rented trailer in the Route 605 Trailer Court, the one with the picturesque view of the rock quarry, the water tower, the sewage-treatment plant, and the billboard for Al’s Ford and Used Cars.
          Yeah, that’s what the typical wedding is like in our county.

No comments: