Love in the Time of COVID- Quarantine Weddings -Submission
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Sam and I had always wanted a smaller, more intimate wedding (which pre-COVID people thought was crazy!) Our original wedding plan was a total of 30 people in April 2020 at the Annapolis courthouse, followed by lunch at our favorite restaurant, Preserve. We bought out the entire restaurant, picked the menu, locked in our photographer, did our cake tasting, met with our florist, had the make-up trial, booked everybody’s Airbnb’s . . . we were ready.
In early March 2020, COVID started to creep into all of our lives. I laughed when telling people, “Uh oh, I hope our wedding next month isn’t cancelled!” Everybody assured us that it would be fine. We were just going to “flatten the curve” for two weeks and then everything would be okay, right? By the end of March, restaurants were starting to close, and restrictions were being put into place.
With all of the uncertainty surrounding the wedding, one thing went as planned: we closed on our new house in Locust Point on April 1, 2020. While walking around our neighborhood the first night, we stumbled upon the Tide Point pier on the Under Armour campus and joked, “I wish we could just get married here.” A few weeks went by and we were seeing more “quarantine weddings” on social media. Sam and I looked at each other and wondered, “What if we just got married on the water and had the reception at our house?”
We cut the guest list to nine people (only our parents and siblings) and found a date that worked with all of our previous vendors. We found a caterer willing to cook at our house and Instagram searching led me to a rental company that specialized in small-scale weddings.
Our wedding was Sunday, September 27 at home with only our immediate families—and it was absolutely perfect.
Our wedding party walked from our house down to the end of the street to the water. Neighbors cheered and congratulated as we made the journey. My best friend helped to set up chairs on the water for a “flash ceremony,” officiated by my stepdad. After the ceremony, we took pictures, walked back to our house, popped champagne from 1990 (saved from the day Sam was born) on our roof deck, and ate the most delicious meal in our backyard under string lights. Our entire wedding was dreamier than anything we could have originally planned, and we would do the same exact plan again in a heartbeat.
