This is a very romantic story of a wedding dress currently displayed in The Smithsonian:
"In August 1944, Hensinger, a B-29 pilot, and his crew were returning from a bombing raid over Yowata, Japan, when their engine caught fire. The crew was forced to bail out. Suffering from only minor injuries, Hensinger used the parachute as a pillow and blanket as he waited to be rescued. He kept the parachute that had saved his life. He later proposed to his girlfriend Ruth in 1947, offering her the material for a gown.
Ruth wanted to create a dress similar to one in the movie Gone with the Wind. She hired a local seamstress, Hilda Buck, to make the bodice and veil. Ruth made the skirt herself; she pulled up the strings on the parachute so that the dress would be shorter in the front and have a train in the back. The couple married July 19, 1947. The dress was also worn by the their daughter and by their son’s bride before being gifted to the Smithsonian."
It's especially touching when a person's personal experience is brought into their wedding. When a couple are planning their ceremony with me I encourage them to draw on their experience together as we express their hopes for the future. Some couples have faced tough times together so know they can rise to the mark when life takes a turn for the worst. Almost all couples live together for a substantial period of time before they marry so they've stood by each other despite seeing their partner at their least glamorous. Many couples have children before they marry so they've experienced romantic love and a whole new kind of love with each other.
Then there are other couples who have maybe not been together for long, had no testing situations with which to prove themselves, yet they still have experience to draw upon: courage to enter into a marriage without a long test period and a willingness to trust and nurture a growing love.
There's no getting out of the fact that we're all going to have difficult times in our lives but it's lovely to remind yourselves on your wedding day of how your past can contribute to the support you'll give one another in the future.
