This Wedding Needs A Trough

The first thing to know about this list is that these aren’t rules. Rather, they are inevitabilities you’d do better to just embrace because fighting against them will only exhaust you and no one likes a tired bride. You can try to throw them out, but they will appear the next morning in your breakfast hotdish, ready to slide down your gullet. And now, without further ado, 5 Things To Know About Getting Married On Your Parents’ Lawn (If Your Hometown Is Exactly The Same As Mine).

Two days before my wedding, my parents and I pulled up outside the Thief River Falls, Minnesota Tractor Supply in search of some final pieces to the lawn-wedding puzzle. Specifically, we were worried about guests’ drinks getting warm, a crime punishable by 10,000 years spent loitering in the parking lot between the Taco John’s and the Subway (also known as “The Lot,” a detail my husband was sure to point out while I was writing this piece.)

“What about this trough, here?” my mother asked. “We could keep all the drinks in this trough, here, on ice, and that would keep them cool.”

“Or we could put salads and ice cream in them!” my father suggested, helpfully.

“I have to admit that seems like it would work, but is ‘Trough of Salad’ the theme we’re going for? I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m just…asking questions.” I offered, carefully.

“What about a series of wheelbarrows?” My dad said, gesturing to some shiny wheelbarrows I assume are for, like, refuse? I don’t know what wheelbarrows are for, to be honest. Maybe they are for salads. If only I had a contact at The Golden Corral, I would ask.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tractor Supply, you probably think it’s just tractor or farm-relevant equipment, you absolute fool. To think that, you’d have to ignore all the other gems beyond the Tractor Supply walls. Like this shirt:

I’ve thought about “You’ve just stepped into the wrong barn” a lot — daily and nightly — and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just one of those things we’re not evolved enough to understand. Its beauty and complexity, something only the aliens can parse when they invade, what, two years from now? If Tractor Supply’s website is accurate, they also have a lot, and I mean A LOT of t-shirts featuring Beth Dutton quotes. If I didn’t know better, I’d say a fictional character from the TV series Yellowstone had purchased Tractor Supply in order to get her message out into the world.

They also sell a shirt that reads “Heifers Gonna Hate” which I assume means their cows are unhappy? I don’t know.

I can’t remember if or what we purchased that day — I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t all a fever dream — but the drinks stayed cold so we probably got something. Or we just turned people away when they asked for a drink, shouting “YOU’VE JUST STEPPED INTO THE WRONG BARN!”

Much of the food was purchased last minute, which was mostly fine. Other than the fact that it had been really hot that week, so Walmart was out of ice cream for the sundae bar. I had to send my friend’s husband, in his rental car, to Hugo’s in search of ANY ice cream. Thankfully, he found it. Unthankfully, a car hit his rental in the parking lot. Can’t win ‘em all.

In closing, if you decide to get married on your parents’ lawn in northern Minnesota: expect the unexpected, put out some extra chairs for passersby, and if there’s any chance of rain — don’t get a bouncy castle. The children will jump into it holding wet candy and the whole thing will be exactly as horrifying as you think.

In a big city, it would be hard for a business to run without a pretty official computer system, shooting out receipts with each transaction. (There are some exceptions, of course, I’ve been to some pretty casual late-night donut shops.) But in a small town, you could very well end up with one of these:

Thankfully, I don’t keep receipts anyway, because I’m irresponsible.

My mom proudly wore a bolo tie. And you know what? It worked.

We all know how wedding attendance works. You spend months figuring out a final headcount, ordering invitations, hand addressing those invites, mailing them out, and setting up a website so people can RSVP to attend the wedding. This has been the expected pattern for nearly all weddings in recent memory.

A month before my wedding in 2018, I started getting some teeny tiny clues that we had a slightly different fate awaiting us. My parents, anyone who knows them will tell you, are the ultimate night-on-the-town couple over 60. Nearly every week for as long as I can remember, they’ve gone out dancing at the VFW. Country cover band? Odd DJ? The radio just turned up really loud? Whatever it is, my parents will be dancing to it. A couple of days after one of their iconic outings, I was catching up with my dad on the phone.

“Oh, forgot to tell ya, I ran into that gal what’s-her-name at the VFW and told her about the wedding.

“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” I said, hoping for but never receiving further information about this woman’s identity.

“Anyway, this gal said ‘So, I hear there's some kinda wedding on your lawn next month, what's the deal with that then, is it kinda an open thing? Can I just come?”

“…What do you mean?”

“So I said sure, come on by.”

“An OPEN THING? The wedding is an open thing now? Why did I spend all this time sending invitations if the whole thing is simply open to anyone and everyone in town who knows where you live?”

“Same with what’s-his-name and that gal of his. And the guy next door with the chickens will probably walk over. I assume he’ll be drunk. The chickens, too. Well, they won’t be drunk but they’ll maybe wander over during the ceremony — or if we’re lucky, the reception! That could be fun.”

My mom shouted in the background, “The chickens are white so they’ll go with the decorations! Won’t even clash or anything!”

A couple of days before the wedding, my then-fiance and I had to go to the courthouse to get our marriage license. Everything in the courthouse is 700 years old, and they require cash payment. Not expecting to need cash, because it was 2018 and not 1918, he had to run to the nearby bank to get some cash.

Several tellers were working at the bank that day, and while I looked at the extremely old gigantic books of records, deeds, and I assume, truly haunted objects at the courthouse, word was quickly spreading at the bank. When Al returned, marriage-license cash in hand, he informed me that everyone at the bank figured out who he was, why he was there, and that they knew my dad and planned to “stop by”
the wedding or at least “drive by really slowly so we can see it!”

Everywhere we went, we found more and more people we didn’t invite but who planned to “come over.”

In the end, many people who weren’t invited did, in fact, show up.

But they also brought cards stuffed with cash, so everybody won.

Mostly us.

Thanks for reading! Season 1 of This Small Town podcast just wrapped up last week. Between seasons, I’ll continue posting various written pieces like this one, and some bonus eps of the podcast, including something special for the holidays.