And Guns'n'Roses will not be playing the reception.

The local forecast for Saturday has been evolving over the past several days, from "cloudy with a chance of showers" (bearable) to, simply, "RAIN". Flat, gray rain. Emotionless, rainy rain. The kind of rain that makes everything wet on days when things are not supposed to be getting wet and which, when forecast for one's wedding day, is highly unbearable.

Fuck.

I have never been so obsessed with the weather. I jolted awake at 3:30am last night and checked the ten-day forecast again (bad idea) then tried desperately to calm myself back to sleep with a reminder that I actually adore rainy days. The smell of wet earth, the lush green of the lawns, the musical pitter-pat of raindrops... I love all these things. Most of the time.

Unfortunately, rather than returning blissfully to dreamland, I spent the remaining hours until dawn tormented by visions of myself as the unwilling participant in a sort of bridal-edition wet t-shirt contest overseen by the oh-so-whimsical Mother Nature. And when I did finally fall asleep, plagued by worries about how hard it is to hold a candle in the cold September rain, I had a nightmare that someone had stolen my wedding dress and replaced it with this.



And then I realized: it's not really the wedding-day rain that worries me. It's wedding-day rain in combination with hideous half-gowns and inevitable death from some kind of mysterious head trauma.