This Folly Beach wedding, as with most pandemic weddings, has been a long time coming.
Simone and Michael had been planning for months for a March wedding on the beach, and had been making their own centerpieces, wedding favors and other special touches. Simone had splurged on the perfect wedding gown, and had sent out save-the-dates. But then the country went into lockdown at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. So Simone and Michael put their Folly Beach plans on hold and had a small family wedding on their original March date, in Columbia SC where they live. I wrote a lot of mushy, sentimental stuff about these two in that post. Michael is my (Erin’s) brother, and we were all over the moon to see him become officially wed to the best partner we could ever imagine for him.
The little March wedding, at a friend’s lake house, got them married, but they still had a beach house reserved, and an unworn wedding gown, and lots of ideas they wanted to bring to life for their big day. So five months later, we did it all over again, this time on the beach, with more family and friends, a wedding feast that Simone and her family cooked themselves (cooking for people is one of her love languages), and a fun little dance party at the beach house. She wore the dress, and they said new vows to each other in the sand at Folly Beach in front of family and close friends. After the ceremony, they did an adorable getaway on bicycles and took a cruise down the beach, just the two of them (after we got Simone’s dress untangled from the gears, that is – oops!).
The pandemic has flipped the wedding world on its head, and most events have had to take different forms. They’ve been postponed, canceled or shrunk down into micro-weddings. In our case, we feel fortunate that the pandemic allowed us to celebrate Simone and Michael twice – once as a tiny family wedding, and once more as the Folly Beach wedding they had dreamed of. Everyone’s just trying to figure this new era out week to week, day by day. And anytime there is an opportunity to focus on the good things that remind us of who we truly are and what is important to us, we should seize it. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, life goes on, families grow, love wins.