Your Special Day - The Vancouver Sun (Feb 20, 07)
By Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun
Whether it was something old, new, borrowed or something blue, no one's wedding day is more unique than your own. Vancouver Sun readers sent us pictures and treasured memories of their big day, prompting our own Shelley Fralic to recollect and reminisce about the day she became a bride ... and the dress she was wearing.
I look at the wedding dress, and the young woman who is wearing it, more than 30 years ago, and I see so much.
I see promise in her bearing, and hope in her eyes. I see happiness and, yes, even innocence.
Mostly, though, I see a life's map, yet to be charted, yet to be fully explored.
The dress, from Yofi Creations, a boutique on Granville's Theatre Row, was divine, and I had coveted it for months, saving up the $100 to make it mine.
Like the wedding, and indeed the marriage itself, the dress was anything but conventional.
It was full-length and the colour of clotted cream, made of thick flecked cotton with rich lace inlay. Its empire bodice was tied up the front, creating a modest plunge, and the lace-trimmed long sleeves had exquisite button closures.
Its lines and quaintness, and faint hippie flair, recalled a nobler time, when Guinevere might have worked her charms.
It was 1975, after all, and mine was a generation still living deep in the heart of bohemia.
Which meant there would be no walk down the aisle, no do-you-promise-to-obey vows, no caterer, no deejay, no receiving line, no fancy diamond rings.
And certainly no frothy white dress with matching veil.
There was a church, though, St. Giles United near Oakridge, chosen not out of religion but out of fondness, it being where the bride's parents had married years before.
There was a reception hall, too, the Sons of Norway Centre on Canada Way, picked because the family has roots in Norway and because it was just down the block from the honeymoon suite, a room at the 401 Motor Inn.
The party food was hearty and homemade, cabbage rolls, perogies, potato salad and the like, and the wedding cake -- a two-by-three-foot chocolate and white Black Forest sheet cake -- was served for dessert. My mother's boyfriend tended the bar.
Oh, and there was our baby. He was six months old, at home with the mother-in-law of the best man.
I was 22, Glen was 25, and we would honeymoon, as a gift from my father, at the Harrison Hot Springs Hotel.
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A wedding dress is many things.
It is ritual, and symbol, and couture, and its choice speaks not only to the past and the present, but to the future.
But beyond that is something else, something less tangible, because no matter the shape it takes, or the material it's fashioned from, or the union it graces, a wedding dress is the one piece of clothing that, once worn, a woman never, ever, forgets.
I took my wedding dress out of a drawer the other day, and pulled it from the plastic bag, tied tight with an elastic band, into which I had slipped it into 32 years ago, and where it has stayed as I carried it with me from house to house, from marriage to divorce, from the birth of my children to the death of their father, from a full house to living alone, from blissful motherhood to ecstatic grandparenthood.
I unfolded it tenderly, half expecting it to have fallen victim to moths, or discolouring, or that musty smell that clothes get when they aren't worn, but it was as crisply fresh and clean-smelling as the day I put it on, a sturdy, pretty confection of intricate lace, detailed stitching and pearl-essence buttons.
There is no size marked in the label, but the dress is impossibly tiny through the waist and hips and shoulders, and is feminine in a dainty way that surprises me now.
I look at it now and can remember, as if it were yesterday, that hot summer night, the music and the smells and the laughter, and the love and luck that I felt from the inside out, for my beautiful son waiting at home, and my handsome husband, so full of life and charm, and my wonderful family and friends, so goofy and yet so gracious.
I look at my wedding dress today and my heart swells, with all those memories but also with a feeling that is harder to define, a different kind of love perhaps, tinged with pride and a deeper sense of self, but also with loss and even regret.
My wedding dress, more than anything else I own, holds not just memories, but a declaration of the girl who was, and would be.
sfralic@png.canwest.com
