Up in Flames
I had every intention of blogging yesterday. And then I got a message from my best friend’s mom that the store where she bought her wedding dress and where we bought our bridesmaid dresses burnt down. Take a look at those pictures. It’s really scary.
Her wedding? It’s in 3 weeks.
Her dress? She had a fitting at 12:30 yesterday. The fire started at 3:00. It’s gone. Our dresses, too. But our dresses aren’t nearly as important as hers. Hers was a designer gown – the stuff of Say Yes to the Dress, complete with a tearful moment of happiness when she decided that one was The One.
Did I mention her wedding is in 3 weeks?
Thank goodness no one was hurt. Thank goodness her wedding isn’t tomorrow or Saturday like some of the other brides interviewed in the news articles. But 3 weeks? I mean, I remember myself 3 weeks before my wedding and there’s a good possibility that if this were me, I’d be inconsolable.
Not to mention that this could be the most important dress she ever wears in her life. Wedding dresses are strange things, especially when you pick them out over a year before you get married. They sort of take on personalities and become a fixture of your life for that time, like a friend you haven’t seen in a year and can’t wait to visit.
So, even though her maid of honor was on the phone with the designer and other stores in the area trying to find another dress and I (the matron of honor) was scouring the Internet for the bridesmaid dresses, there was a good possibility that, even if we found everything exactly the same, it wouldn’t be exactly the same. And Christina, my friend, had every right to a total emotional breakdown last night.
But when I talked to her on the phone, she was laughing. She was joking about the whole situation, and thanking her lucky stars that she had enough time to figure this out. She was saying how lucky she really was that she might get to go wedding dress shopping twice in her life, and then joking about how she planned on drinking at least two glasses of wine because she deserved it.
Christina, needless to say, is amazing. She somehow always finds the positive in every situation. She has been this way our whole lives, so I’m not surprised at all at last night’s phone call, but I still find her high spirits and perseverance amazing and something to emulate. She just knows that it will all work out; maybe she doesn’t know how, but she knows it will. And it will – we will all make sure of it.
It’s important to keep things in perspective when things like this happen, and Christina does this beautifully with grace and a smile. She truly is an amazing woman, my best friend.