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Blizzard Wedding
Thu Mar 06, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Today, commentator Chuck Kruger recalls a special storm.
The day before our daughter's wedding the weather was perfect, blue skies, windless,
heavy-sweater weather. How could we believe reports that we were in for a repeat of the
blizzard of 1888? We were clearly in the throes of early spring. But Friday night, March 12th,
1993, our daughter couldn't sleep. She heard the wind begin to howl. Outside her apartment
window in Wilmington, Delaware, six inches of snow had already fallen.
The storm intensified. Cars crawled the drifting rural lane. Wires were down. Guests, in
parkas, shovelled the path to the front porch. Many, like the bride and the groom, arrived in
hiking boots. I forgot to take mine off during the ceremony. Without electricity, there was no
heating, no music. We placed candles in the window embrasures.
The bridal pair stood, facing each other, to say their Quaker vows -- in the presence of God
and their friends. The wind howled -- with divine assistance. The snow flicked importunately
against the windowpanes ... "so long as we both shall live." A few of us cried ... "to be
loving and faithful." The William Penn oak bowed a limb ... "I take thee."
It was impossible -- in the middle of the blizzard of 1993 -- to imagine a more apt wedding
for our daughter. Everything, everyone, cooperated. It felt as though the blizzard itself
blessed the event.
Chuck Kruger is back at his home on Cape Clear Island, Ireland. The Weather Notebook is funded
by The National Science Foundation, and Subaru, co-sponsor of The Weather Notebook's
cross-country weather tour.
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