We Applied for a Marriage License

We had to drive downtown to get our marriage license. We were hoping we could get it in Wyoming, but the woman at the City Hall told us we had to drive to Grand Rapids and talk to someone at the County Clerk’s office. Neither of us wanted to go to into the city, but we went anyway. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, an unfortunate reality of life. 

We parked in a parking garage and walked up three flights of stairs to reach the outdoors again. We walked past a tall brick building and Sean mentioned how his dad used to work in the building next to it for a while. I believe memories cross our minds at important moments. And sometimes even the mundane memories have a way of blessing the moment. We don’t forget people we can’t see anymore, we remember them with an intensity and gratefulness. And for me, in the moments Sean makes these off handed comments, I am left to sputter my wheels in intense wonder. Great the man must have been who raised someone as wonderful as Sean; who is well-rounded and kind, well mannered and thoughtful. Genuine men can be hard to come by these days, how lucky I was to have found Sean. What a long path we had to endure to find ourselves on that bus that day. Great is the man who helped Sean down the path to me. I would tell him thank you, if I could, and I think he would understand the simplicity in it. But I cannot speak these words, so we take the memory of him working in a building, and we smile about what the view he looked at might have been like. Then we walk into the County Clerk’s office ready to begin the paperwork process. 

There wasn’t a long line, which pleased us both, and justified our decision to come here at 1:30 on a Wednesday afternoon. We wrote our names and birth place on a pink slip of paper. We wrote our mother’s maiden names and our county of residence on the lines provided, too. We gave them our birth certificates and questioned the spelling of “Phoenix” which doesn’t make any sense on any level. The woman made copies of our paperwork and made us raise our right hands. We didn’t understand we were supposed to say “yes” until she told us to. 

We walked through revolving doors into the city again. There were two other people in the courtyard and when I insisted to Sean that I take our picture to document this moment, I intentionally angled my phone to omit them from the shot. The skies were darkening above us and it looked like it would rain. We walked three flights of stairs back to the car and drove back home an hour later.