Paying for your daughter's wedding in India can be an oppressive weight for a farmer. But one village has a successful
tradition of planting fruit trees when a daughter is born. The child helps care for it over the years and in the time of engagement the mangoes are sold to fund the wedding. Pretty sweet idea.
A friend once created a wedding garden in anticipation of her own celebration. I can imagine the joy she and her family felt in watching the roses take root, and finally picking them for the bouquets. While I cannot recall the wedding itself, I have never forgotten her wise investment.
The idea of women gathering to create a double wedding ring quilt for a young girl's hope chest is precious to me. I have participated in a score of wedding quilts for new couples. House blocks, Dresden Plates, Log Cabins and baskets are tangible containers for the love surrounding that marriage. Beauty and warmth hold hands to cover the husband and wife through the bleak winter nights.
One of the themes running through each of these efforts is that marriage begins a long time before the cake is cut. Years before, forward thinking parents and brides and aunts are digging in the dirt and threading small eyed needles for a relationship that has not yet broken through the ground. Farmers and quilters have known for centuries that such preparation is worth the effort. They show up at dawn with a bag of seeds or at dusk with a pocket full of fabric. Then the work begins.
But somehow the labor is done willingly, even if the one sweating never sleeps under the Double Wedding Ring, nor tastes the ripe orange pulp.
