Telling the families….a love story continued…..

Telling the families….a love story continued…..
When we left off, Colleen had just graduated from high school (with honors I may add and the best quarter of school in her whole high school career, was the one she was married for… I guess she didn’t have to worry about boys that quarter. That is what I figure anyway. Actually now that I think about it, her whole senior year was the best she had in high school, so I was part of it all. Well back to the story… Well where were we, besides married and as far as I knew only her and I and a few people in Malad Idaho, knew that we were married. We had not decided when and how to tell anyone, and Colleen was entertaining the idea of just having a civil wedding after I turned 21 and could sign, and not tell anyone that we had been married before. Then we got called into her Bishop’s office one Sunday afternoon to talk about our upcoming wedding. Colleen tried to ask him if it was okay to have a ‘pretend’ wedding. He said he did not understand, what she meant by pretend, so she said just one so people will think we got married. He still did not understand, and so she said that we were already married and could we put on a fake wedding for our parents. His answer, you can imagine. He asks if anyone knew, and we both said no. His counsel was for us to go tell our parents and get it over with. So we left there and decided to go and talk with my brother Jerry and his wife Teri. After all it was their fault we had met in the first place, because Jerry coached the softball team, and Teri played on it. When we talked to them they told us how it would probably go at my parent’s home. We would tell them and then my dad would say something like “Well, what are you going to do now?”
Jerry and Teri went with us to my parent’s house and after telling them, my dad made a great statement. He looked at us and said “Well, what are you going to do now?” That was the easy one; my mom actually hugged Colleen and welcomed her to the family. Now came the tough one, Colleen’s parents. Well we went and told them, and her mom came unglued to say the least. She yelled and screamed at me for quite a while, told me how I had disappointed her and how she had trusted me with her daughter. ( we did not know until many, many years later, that the reaction probably came because her mother and father had eloped also). Then when all was said and done, they invited us to stay at their house until we could get a place of our own. That only took a few days, as someone Fisher’s knew had a daughter just moving out of a basement apartment in Clearfield. So we got the information and moved in quickly to start a real life of our own. Then came the most surprising part; my mother (who did not let me live in the house after getting engaged, and who threatened to veto our wedding and reception) called Colleen’s mother to talk about a reception for us. Colleen’s mom was dead set against it, as we had already chosen our path, but my mother stated that if she had to, she would hold a reception for us, so after all was said and done, they gave us a reception, held at Fisher’s house outside on a beautiful June day. Colleen’s mom, who had made wedding cakes for years, made our cake and catered the reception herself. It was a wonderful evening. We had lots of guests, and I had extremely long hair for that night.
Colleen was beautiful, and there is no other way to describe her. She was wearing her sister-in-law Jill, wedding dress. Her colors were purple and pink and what else should I expect from someone who shares a birthday with Mr. Purple socks himself, Donny Osmond. She has always loved purple.
After all that, what in our young married life would not be easier than what we went through to get there?
A side note to this all, one of our beautiful daughters eloped, so we now have a three generation ‘Tradition’ going on here….. did not say it was a good tradition, just a tradition.
Guess it is time for the dark side to go back into hibernation for a while. Colleen ask me to type this as it is getting harder and harder for her to type anything at all, as her left hand is fading more and more…