Wedding and Reception

(Above - toasting)

Yesterday we went to a wedding in the family. It was a tradition southern Baptist wedding.

Afterwards we went to the reception in nearby Roswell at the famous Roswell Mill Site. The owner of Roswell Mill was the founder of Roswell, Roswell King. What is so famous about Roswell Mill is that during the Civil War when Sherman’s Yankee forces took over the area he found that Roswell Mill was fabric kind of things to aid the Confederacy. He had the women Mill workers arrested for treason and they were sent to factories in the north to work.

They went to work one day and found themselves on a train heading north. They didn’t know that morning would be pulled apart for their families and loved ones.

A rushing creek noisily flows by, which I am sure in 1864 the mill made good hydra use of that fast flowing water.

Now, it is a place for special events, such as wedding receptions.

They had finger food, opened bar, a dj, hustling waitresses and waiters to keep dirty scrappy dishes off the tables.

The bride and groom came in and were cheered and so were the groomsmen and the bride’s maids.

They danced. They danced many combinations. Bride and Groom, Groom and mother, bride and new father-in-law, and on and on. The Bride’s father is a preacher that does I think does not believe in dancing. He danced with his 7 or 98 year old granddaughter.

People got up and made toasts to the newly wed couple… some people got emotional when trying to speak. Then they cut the cakes – both cakes, the wedding cake and the groom’s cake which looked like a golf clubs bags. I was one of the first in line to get a piece.

It was hot as hell.

Plenty of people had to step outside in the evening air to get a breath of cool fresh air. And the smokers greeted them with opened arms.

We sat with my sister-in-law and her daughters. The music and the speech making got loud and we had to holler at our table to hear each other talk. My sister-in-law, a very religious woman, hollered to me, over the noise in the room “I used to dance with the Devil and now I dance with Jesus!”

I thought, “What kind of dancing with Jesus.”

Once when sight seeing in Los Angeles my sister-in-law and her daughters found the Hollywood Bowl and she stood under the acoustic shell and sung “Amazing Grace.” After he husband died she and her friend found a new love: Traveling. They have traveled just about all over the world and make the best unpredicted scrapbooks. That is what makes her scrapbooks good: Thelma knows no journalistic rules to guide her, so she has complete freedom to make her scrapbooks anyway way she wants.

This night she told us seating near her about her and her late husband’s wild times in Las Vegas when they apparently lived there… that was when she dancing with the Devil.