Just dreaming: I can dream

Category: Happy Times | Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 7:54 pm

After reading the thread posted by Dooley I just could not help myself. I started dreaming and spent most of my day thinking WEDDING, and more particularly a farm wedding. Just imagine with everyone pitching in:
- Friends and neighbours lend cutlery and extra plates.
- The bridal bouquet and wedding flowers coming from the gardens and the veld and the vlei ( the vlei would be marshy areas where Zantedeschia and other bog type flowers grow naturally.)
- Impromptu music.
- Children having major fun,
- Grannies of both groom and bride finding their own quiet corners.
- Platters of food arriving with every new arrival, and all the farm workers being part of the occasion
- And the party continuing right into the evening around braai fires. (Braai - Afrikaans for barbeque)
When the bridal pair leaves for their honeymoon, the guests will find beds where they can or drive back to their own homes in pickup trucks with their children asleep on mattresses in the back...

I always wanted a wedding on a farm, alas I got married in a registry office complete with postponing the wedding by a day due to work pressure. Even directly after the wedding I had to go back to work with our parents going out to tea and cake in a restaurant. There was no honeymoon either.

My eldest is now 23 and I have been dreaming and thinking 'aloud' and this was what my son heard while I was 'thinking':
Guests from far and wide, including overseas. All converging on a farm in mid-December. (Our summertime). We would have a wedding celebration to end all celebrations. A huge barn obviously suitable decorated and all the implements, livestock and machinery cleaned out. Lighting courtesy of lanterns at dusk. Lamb on the spit and music for dancing. We would probably have to hire a musician to play rousing music for the occasion OR maybe even get old Koos, who cannot read music but will play any tune if you whistle it to him (We obviously cannot ask family members to provide the music even though most of them do play an instrument.) On the subject of Koos though I cannot quite see how we'd do this for the wedding march or trendy modern music for the young (including myself here). But someone said Koos is real good - in fact so good that the dogs howl.

Needless to say this thinking did not go well with Ian or even his sister Vera-Lynn (16 going on 17) Vera-Lynn is thinking more in terms of hats, gloves, tails, embossed invitations, salmon served in green country settings that does not quite match my setting in the heat of summer and the harvest of wheat leaving just brown stubble and brown hills.
Ian on the other hand wanted to know how would one put up 100 people who would be driving considerable distances and we would then expect of them to drive back again afterwards. And what about the fact that there might just be on loo.
"I can just see 40 people at a time in a queue all for the loo. The water pump on the blink, a fight or two on the fringes in the crowd, the farm kids bungee-jumping off the tractors. The tannie (Afrikaans for auntie) from the other side of the mountain putting crocheted doilies on everything stationary and fainting away at the colourful language used by some members of the family in friendly banter. Besides what would the temperature be - 40 degrees Celsius in the shade? Everything brown and looking like a desert. This all makes a morning suit out of the question - the groom might just pass out from standing to attention in the heat?"

They at least both liked the idea of guests sitting on hay bales in a friendly barn with chickens roosting and music till dawn. I suppose I could build on that as a start. I can dream can't I?

Last edited: Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:27 pm

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Droopy wrote on Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:38 pm:

Yes you can, and I find myself sitting here and dreaming too.

kuntrygal wrote on Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:22 pm:

You sure can... so go for it!

Sjoerd wrote on Mon Mar 10, 2008 11:33 pm:

I did just like Droopy...You know Palm, a person without dreams has no life at all.
There are words to a song in the old musical, "South Pacific", that go something like, "...if you ain't got a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true"?
I reckon that says it all.

glendann wrote on Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:04 am:

Yep always dream a little dream.

Palm Tree wrote on Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:15 am:

Thanks all of you.
I will not stop dreaming - because the one dream will lead to another - one of grandchildren...I always wanted a farm wedding if not for myself, then for one of my children.
Like you are saying Glenda - a little dream.