It's Friday. Time to See What We Forgot.

Friday, May 20th dawned crystal clear. The Comfort Inn had the one building you see to the left, and another building, called the "Executive Wing", where mom and I stayed. To the right, off the photo, was a defunct restaurant called "Wings".

We got our free breakfast and set out to find the farm. The directions we had were how to get from the hotel to the church and from the church to the farm, not from the hotel to the farm. But, hey, I have a vague idea of where it is. Let's go for a drive.

After 40 minutes, we returned to the parking lot of the Safeway grocery store and called Carole for directions. We had traveled through some beautiful country but in the wrong direction. We'd have wound up in western Virginia had I not turned around and gone back. It was the kind of country, however, where I could leisurely drive, just seeing the homes and farms, some of which, it was obvious, had been there at and probably before the Civil War.

With directions in hand, we found the farm easily. The tent for the reception was up. Tables and chairs were under it. It was beginning to look like there was an event happening here.

We moved some of the tables and chairs out of the way so the guys could build a dance floor. The kids could have rented one but David's dad said he could build one with materials he had on hand. It was, actually, a pretty good "floor" for being sections of plywood nailed to a frame. It helps to have crafty people around who can say, "Hmmm. I can do that."

We jumped into putting the finishing touches on reception items. As Carole and David are very much into photography, they had a disposable camera on every table for guests to take informal photos. They also had one of their collection of old cameras on each table with instructions on how it was to be used.

The camera at the very bottom, thin and going vertically in the photo, is my grandfather, Alfred's, camera. I do not remember him ever using it. My mother had it in her stuff and, when Carole and David passed through Iowa last year, she gave it to Carole. Yes, you can get film still that works in these old cameras. David has some film that gave an expiration date of 1953 on it. They like using "expired" film because of the effects you can get. Grandpa Al's camera was on our table. It took me a couple photographs to understand exactly how it worked but I used up the roll they had in it. I'm curious to see what the photos look like.

We worked together, bridesmaids, parents, David and Carole, friends and other relatives, to get the tent and the house reception ready. I neglected to take photos of the table decorations as we fixed those. Each table was identified by a state where the kids had lived or had some attachment to. People were organized via a connection to a state. In my case, I was at the "Iowa" table. There was a bread basket, the camera with instructions, a place holder with the state name and a collection of photos taken in that state, a scattering of silk flowers in white and green and 3 small plastic bottles of bubbles. We organized everything into bags and, on Saturday put the bags and cameras on the proper tables. The caterer then set everything out as they set up.

With all the hands, there was plenty of time to sit around and chat on Kitty and David's wide front porch. I got a lot of cross-stitching done on Friday, jumping up when I was needed. There was a minor problem with the dress which was fixed. The dance floor came together and in spite of what seemed like chaos, it appeared we were, in fact, going to have a wedding the next day and it was going to go off without a hitch.

Beverage:  English Breakfast tea

Deb