Kyle & Samantha | Valentine's Wedding

Valentine's Day dawned so cold and crisp there was a 30 below windchill and icicle figments glittered in the face numbing air. But there was little this Winter Wisconsin weather could do to hinder the love and warmth that gathered everybody together in the small chapel nestled in fields just outside the 3,475 populace of Bloomer.

The bride, Samantha, was a sheer picture of beauty and grace. When wedding planning handed her some of the most gigantic lemons of the universe, she calmly stirred the sugar in to create lemonade because all she really cared about at the end of February 14, 2015 was the signed document that bound her lifetime to the Canadian boy who stole away her heart.

Her eyes sparkled the way they did last Fall when I sat across from her sipping coffee at a Caribou Coffee when she asked me to photograph her wedding. She told me about this Kyle. Someone she had known for some time, but never thought of him as husband potential. Until one day it clicked. It was so right. The gold and diamonds on her slender finger caught the sparkle in her eye. It hardly seemed a second thought for her to leave her life, her home, her family to go join his in Canada. Whatever it took to live side by side with the love of her life was hardly even a sacrifice.

And now here she was today. The day she had dreamed all her life about. Her dress had been a fiasco of a nightmare when it arrived. No returns, no money back. But she had full confidence in her mother and aunt's ingenuity to recreate it into a vintage style dream of a gown for her. It was perfect. She was so elegant in it. She covered herself in the veil her mother wore, in her hands she held a gorgeous bouquet she created with her sisters and friend. Her eyes danced, for today she would become the wife of Kyle and that was all that mattered. Yet selflessly she reached out to everybody joining her that day and loved and laughed with them.

Surrounded by their loved ones, we watched as Kyle and Samantha joined hands in matrimony. With earnestness they vowed their lives to each other til death. They laughed, they prayed, I saw a few tears, they kissed. She took his name and together they became husband and wife.