I had been working at Daylight Donuts for five months, when Dan finally asked me out, the first part of February. The end of April he asked me to marry him. At the time, it didn’t feel like a whirl-wind romance, but it sure looks that way in print.

Brenda, having not found in Colorado what she was looking for, moved back home the end of May. That left me with the option of either staying in my apartment or moving in with Dan’s parents. Not a difficult decision to make. Dan, of course, took it upon himself to move in with me, which should have been a sign right off the bat because I resented losing my independence that suddenly.

We set the wedding date for July 27. As a kid, when I bothered to dream about my wedding, I always pictured it being at my childhood church with a reception at Beilke’s supper club (which is now the Big Moose Inn and at that time the only place other than Pine Tree which had a dance hall).

The church was plain, small, and kind of quaint, set where it was right at the base of the castle rock of Castle Rock. The reception, however, was nothing like we have in Wisconsin. Instead of renting an overpriced hall, we settled on Dan’s parent’s house, and my mother, my aunt and my new mother-in-law did the cooking. For entertainment? Well, there wasn’t any polka band; I don’t even remember if we had somebody’s stereo system set up in the yard.

It was all ok, but just nothing like the weddings I was used to in Wisconsin. The Colorado people all seemed to act like that was how they did it. Just a different culture I guess.

And not to get too far off track, but do you know what the biggest difference between Colorado and Wisconsin was? Fish Fry. No one in Colorado had ever even heard of Friday night fish fry. It blew my mind. There was no reason to ever go out to eat on a Friday night, coz they just had all the same stuff on the menu. It drove me nuts the entire three years that I lived out there!

Of course, after the wedding, the entire next six months I really did go crazy. We lived in my in-law’s basement. I don’t know what I was thinking; how I ever thought that was a good idea. They weren’t bad people and they certainly went out of their way to make me comfortable. Again, it just wasn’t what I planned on doing the first six months of my marriage.

But we had to do it to save money, because something I also never planned on was getting pregnant and since that happened the night that Dan asked me to marry him, well, that’s the start of another whole story.