A beautiful picture and a beautiful story
By Never teh Bride
Item one is a snapshot (from Slate’s Today’s Pictures feature) of a French bride-to-be making her way to the town hall in 1975. Typically, I’m not a fan of gowns embellished with lots of furry ball things, but somehow I can’t help thinking that this dress was impossibly gorgeous. Maybe it’s the wind and maybe it’s thoughts of romance, but I desperately want to see the same picture as taken from the front.
Item two is the story of Britain’s oldest bride, 94-year-old Bess Atkins. She and 86-year-old Winston Barraclough first met while he was volunteering as a driver for a hospital. During that first fateful drive, he actually stopped to buy her a box of chocolates! I hope that someone’s buying me chocolates when I’m almost halfway through my nineties.
Atkins said Barraclough proposed in January on New Year’s Day.
“I thought it was some medical problem and feared the worst,” she said. “He said: ‘Will you be my wife please. I would love to marry you.’ I was totally shocked but I said yes, that would be lovely.”
The pair married at St. Nicholas Church, the same ceremony venue at which Atkins married her first husband in 1939. She said marrying in the same church was lovely and brought back “a lot of happy memories.”
Wonderful, no?
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Thank you for such a beautiful story! True love knows no age. I love this couple for their hope and joy.
The Norwegian and I, while not quite so venerable as Bess and Win, are in our middle age. This is the happiest love we have ever known. I expect that when we are in our 80s and 90s we will still be the happy mushbuckets we are today!
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:39 pm
(happy sigh)
I’m a total sucker for a good love story, so this makes my morning.
Redblur63, happy mushbuckets rock! I also think it’s a perfect description of my great aunt and uncle who were besotted with one another for more than fifty years. May you and the Norwegian share that sort of joy.
May 2nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
What a wonderful picture!
And a charming story. Love is not — as real people know, as opposed to the people who make movies — reserved for the young and beautiful. My parents, ages 70 and 72, have been together since she was 15 and he was 17 — and are still hopelessly in love.
(And I share Twistie’s happy mushbucket wishes to Redblur63 and the Norwegian, of course!)
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:39 pm
I am most certain you and The Norwegian will be as mushy as you are today, Redblur63! Expecting that you will be is the first — and possibly most important — step. I’ve always wondered at those individuals who made less positive assumptions about what married (or partnered) life would be like. Why combine lives at all if you think things will turn out so dire?
May 4th, 2008 at 2:03 am
such story is always so lovely and one wonders what does it mean by true love..
and in fact, though they have little years more…i am sure they are going to cherish each other more, much much more compared to those couples who are young and don’t really love their marriages
May 9th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Bess went for a younger man - you go girl!