Sarah & Michael

Sarah teaches fourth grade in Manheim Township; Michael runs the family's equipment repair shop two towns over. They met at a mutual friend's birthday at a bar in Lancaster city, spent the whole night arguing about whether a hot dog is a sandwich, and did not exchange numbers, so the friend had to broker it a week later.

They were together six years before they got engaged, most of it in a rented half-double with a dog that is in more of the photographs than either set of parents.

They looked at eleven barns before this one. The difference was not the building, because most of them were beautiful. It was that this one had a covered approach, which meant the June forecast stopped being the only thing they talked about for four months.

The brief they gave every vendor was the same sentence: it should look like the barn was already like this. Nothing draped, nothing hidden, nothing trucked in that could not have grown in the field behind it. Sage, cream, and whatever the farm stand had that week.

Sarah and Michael were married in a restored nineteenth-century barn outside Lititz, on the farm where Michael's grandparents kept dairy cattle for forty years. The ceremony ran late because the light was too good to hurry, and dinner was served family-style down one long table under the rafters: bowls passed hand to hand, string lights strung between the beams, and a fiddle player who had agreed to two songs and stayed for nine.

Book the venue and the photographer and then stop for a month. We made almost every other decision in a panic in the first six weeks because it felt like everything was urgent, and then had to unpick half of it.

Also: feed your vendors properly, and put the toasts before dinner. Nobody has ever been sorry to eat while the food is hot.