My Blooming Regrets

I'm pretty lucky in general and can honestly say I don't have many regrets. There is one, however, and it is rather mundane but oddly bothersome when I look back at wedding pictures.

When Hubby and I were engaged in the summer of 2001, he was one of the many servicemen and women who were immediately deployed after 9/11. He was on an aircraft carrier and not able to maintain daily communication during those critical first few weeks. I knew he was okay in the beginning because he did call to let his family and me know he was already en route to an "undisclosed location" (yes, there.) and emails would be sporadic at first but eventually more commonplace. In the meantime we all prayed a lot, held each other together and wrote tons of letters to mail off in a fat Christmas mailer when the snowflakes began to fall.

Also in the meantime, to keep me distracted, I planned a wedding. Our wedding.

Through emails and short telephone calls when Hubby landed somewhere for a day or two leave we pulled off enough communication to decide the big things together. However, all these years later I can clearly see how distracted I must've been because some of the decisions I made single handedly now seem so unlike me, so out of my own character.

In one of our many emailing sessions, we chose to have an outdoor "garden" wedding. Easy breezy, no frills with very few flowers. To keep in line with our mutual decision, I chose to go light on the bridal flowers, bouquets, arrangements, etc. Great, save money and go green!

But, for some unknown reason I chose not to have blue or purple flowers. Somewhere along the way, in my hazy brain, I came to the ridiculous notion that blue and purple were synthetic and not organic enough to be included in our simple outdoor color palette. (Here is where I must say the bridesmaids dresses were literally "sky blue" and show themselves as teal in pictures (seriously, I question my own sanity back then) instead of powdery periwinkle).

To this day it was one of the poorest decisions I've ever made. To this day, I don't love our wedding pictures because the omission of those rich dark blues and purples is too depressing and incomplete for me to stomach. To this day I wish I could go back in time and ask the florist to do an entire bridal bouquet in nothing but magenta and royal blue flowers.

To this day, I feel very fortunate that it's one of my biggest regrets. While life isn't perfect or smooth or always lovely, it is damn good. It is blue and hot pink. It is rise and fall and rise again. It is simple, outdoors, garden variety beautiful and there is no room for regret if you play your cards right. Actually, what I'm finding is that there is no room for regret if you just play your cards. The right happens eventually.



My Blooming Regrets :)