Dani and Melanie’s Ten-Year Vow Renewal and Handfasting in Hood River, OR

Ceremony Spotlight

Dani and Melanie

Hood River, OR | The Griffin House

What they received:

A fully-custom vow-renewal and handfasting ceremony
Day-of officiant services

What Dani and Melanie needed:

Dani and Melanie approached me with a unique ask: to design a ceremony for the wedding they had always wanted, but never had. You see, ten years prior, during a period of extreme hardship, Dani and Melanie tied the knot on a friend’s couch, and since then, they had overcome countless obstacles to build the life they always wanted with each other. So this wedding day wouldn’t just be about the promise of a bright new future: it needed to be an intimate, heartfelt renewal of the vows that had forged them as a family a decade earlier.

How we worked together:

I spent about six months really getting to know M + D and their story. The more I learned about them, the more I grew to love them: their grace, their tenacity, and their undying love for each other demonstrated the absolute highest ideals of what marriage can be. I wrote and rewrote their ceremony, knowing that theirs was a story that needed to be told with all the reverence it deserved.

“Anna made us feel safe when being vulnerable and she made us feel heard when we offered feedback on our first draft. ... It is so important as a queer couple to feel comfortable, and Anna is absolutely the right choice for that! Anna felt like family by the end of the process.”

— Melanie V.

My favorite moments from their ceremony:

It was important to Dani and Melanie that we touched on the importance of the symbol of the moon and its cycles to their story. Just like the moon, their love has gone through periods of light and darkness, but the trustworthy cycle of it all has never changed:
“For time immemorial, folks have turned to the moon as a reminder that as parts of this universe, we all go through phases in life. We’ve all found comfort in the moon’s promise that light will always return after darkness, that emptiness is essential to clear the way for growth, and that the cycles of opening, closing, shining, and dimming, are as elementally a part of us as our cycles of sleeping and waking, inhaling and exhaling.”

This day was pure magic. It was an absolute honor to hold their story, to witness their glory, and to sing their praises for all to hear. We ended with this proclamation:
“Today, we celebrate out loud the legacy of love you have built in your ten-year marriage, and we all offer ourselves to you as your chosen family. You’ve held each other so beautifully all these years. And when the time comes that you may both need holding, no matter when that is, we want you to know that all of our arms will be open, ready to catch you.”