The highly anticipated sequel

Though technically we went to the same high school, we didn't officially meet until we both started working at Amstar Cinemas. After a year of working at Amstar and becoming friends, I noticed that Ryan would try to sit by me when we went as a group to see free movies, and he (okay, we) started switching shifts to work together. Once, while we were working concessions and totally not flirting, an old man looked Ryan in the eye and said, "Just ask her out already!" It was super awkward.

By this point, I was fairly certain Ryan liked me because his two best friends both friend requested me on Facebook (s/o to Cam & Jam!). So I kept trying to invite him to activities with our group of Amstar friends, hoping he would get the hint. On this particular occasion, I invited him to play tennis with us. He was busy, so I suggested we reschedule, and he jokingly said we should play with just the two of us. The rest is history!

On Tuesday, July 11, 2017, Ryan and I went hiking in Red River Gorge—one last hurrah before I moved to Minnesota to get my MFA in Creative Writing. We'd both agreed to get engaged that summer before I left, and I'd picked out the ring myself, so I put two-and-two together pretty easily: I was leaving in two weeks, he was acting kind of weird about going hiking on that specific day, and the trail he wanted to go on was where we went on our first date after becoming "official." We hiked up to the arch, and despite us both being out of breath and pouring sweat, he still managed to get down on one knee.

When the reality that COVID wasn’t going to disappear hit us in May 2020, we were less than 3 months away from the wedding we’d been waiting 3 years for. We were faced with an extremely difficult decision: do we go forward with the wedding (not knowing if it would have to be cancelled due to lockdowns) and risk someone getting sick because of us, postpone it altogether, or plan an entirely new wedding and postpone the reception? We made the extremely hard choice to re-plan and limit our guests to only immediate family and the wedding party, postponing the reception for 2021. Lots of tears, frantically trying to book a cabin in Red River Gorge during peak season, a Zoom bachelorette, and COVID testing and quarantines for our guests later, we made it to July 20, 2020. We had our first official date at Red River Gorge, and we got engaged there, so it made sense that it was where we ended up starting our married life together. The flowers were from Kroger and Ryan’s mom’s hydrangea bush, my makeup was done by one of my maids of honor, Mary, and we (pretty much) all wore Chacos with our fancy clothes. At the edge of a cliff, overlooking the forest below, we read the vows we wrote for each other, and our wonderful friend Jamisen married us. We sat in camping chairs and ate Miguel’s Pizza and Steel City Pops as the sun went down. It was a day filled with love—every single person there helped with some part of pulling this off, and we are eternally grateful for how generous and capacious our friends and families’ hearts are. It wasn’t the wedding we’d planned, but we’ll always be thankful that we were given that day with some of our loved ones before the past year of quarantining and social distancing (and forever thankful that our precautions paid off and no one got sick due to our actions). Now that it’s 2021 and some of us are vaccinated and all of us are masked-up, we’re ready to celebrate with the loved ones we were missing that day last year!