The Wedding Picture

CeCe’s Musings: Writing Exercises

My mother and father step out the church door. Minutes after taking their vows they seem to be looking in different directions: my father off to the side and my mother to the front. But as I gaze closer, I notice my mother’s eyes are shut. Her smile is gigantic, lipstick not yet worn off. She grasps the ruffle of her lace gown to show one shoe and a glimpse of petticoat. My dapper father is sophistication personified in his white jacket and black tuxedo pants.

On their wedding day in 1957, my mother was 22 and my father 29. Eighteen months later I would arrive, but at this moment they are newly married. Innocent. Naive. Hopeful. Joy emanates from both of them. This beloved photo hangs above my desk, and in it I see my young, beautiful parents, long before the weight of life’s worries gifted them with gray strands and lined faces.

The 66 year old photo appears as though it knows nothing about heartache and loss, yet my mother’s father died when she was sixteen and my father had experienced years of abuse from his own father. They both had already known pain, but it can’t be seen in the black and white snapshot from 1957. A young couple is stepping out that church door into their life together, not knowing the loss of memories that will cloud both of their later years. It is good they don’t know, because as the bulb flashes, Sally and Orval Shumate only know the twinkle of what is to come.

(I am beginning a writing journey, using various writing exercises from books I have collected over the years. My writing life has stagnated, and I have discovered I don’t like how I feel when I don’t write. So here I go. Beginning today, (this day after Easter, a time of renewal) I promise to find a prompt and write a minimum of an hour a day. The first exercise “Wedding Pictures” is from Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers & Teachers, edited by Sherry Ellis. Some may bloom; others may suck. I am writing, and for now, that is enough.)