Was It A Wedding Or A Storm?

Actually, the answer is pretty obvious, but when I saw these petals, it did make me think about weddings and showering the bride and groom with everything from rice to bubbles to petals such as these. In the years since my own wedding, rice has gone out of fashion, and things that are easier to clean up around the site of the reception have become more of the norm. That's a good thing. I remember being pelted with rice, lots and lots of rice, and it hurt for one thing. Our overly enthusiastic wedding attendants also filled the glove compartment of our car with rice. We did not know this until months later when we were looking for a road map and opened the glove compartment to find not only what was probably an entire box of rice, but also, thanks to humidity, some awful creepy, crawly bugs! Talk about being totally grossed out. And what a mess to clean up. By itself, uncooked rice is not that easy to clean up anyway. But when you add the larval stage of what was likely rice beetles? Well, do I need to say more? The throwing of rice at newlyweds is a time- honored tradition, though, that goes back to the ancient Romans. They, however, used oats or wheat seeds. The idea behind it is to "rain" fertility and prosperity on the couple. In my case, the fertility part certainly worked, as ten months later I gave birth to our first child, whose birth had definitely not been in our game plan that soon. I really can't complain about prosperity either. I have always had a roof over my head, food, on the table, and some extra left over for some awesome life experiences. Wind tossed petals so reminiscent of the left-overs of a celebrated wedding that triggered memories.