We're married
We got married in a backyard in Clintonville, on a Friday evening in August. Here is the whole weekend, for everyone who was there and everyone we wish could have been.
The whole weekend ↓We were married in the back garden of a house on Glenmont Avenue. It was never built for weddings — it was built for living in: a deep garden, a pergola grown over with grape vines, a reflecting pool holding the length of the lawn. For three days in August we filled it with forty people and asked it to hold a marriage too.
No ballroom, no shuttle, no schedule anyone had to be handed. Just a kitchen that stayed full from Thursday afternoon until Sunday morning, and a lawn that kept its warmth long after the sun went down. Almost everything that mattered happened within a hundred feet of the back door.
We planned it in four months, and the house could only hold so many, so we kept it small and gave it three days instead of one evening. That meant people we love could not be in the garden with us. This page is for you as much as it is for us — the whole weekend in order, with the music, the prayer that opened dinner, and the dance that happened after the power went out. Thank you for loving us into this marriage, from the lawn and from much further away.
- Date
- Friday, August 7, 2026
- Place
- The Glenmont House
- Photography
- Casey Marie
Jump to a chapter
The house
Friday morning it was still only a house: chairs stacked in the grass, somebody's coffee going cold on the rail, every flower in the place waiting in buckets on the counter. Her grandparents had picked them, her sister was making the bouquet, and the arrangements went together in the hands of whoever happened to be standing in the kitchen. Four or five hours to go.
Getting ready
They started the day in bed, crying their way through the music they had chosen, and then the house woke up around them. Hair with Denise, makeup with Candace, a bedroom that filled up and never quite emptied, her heart rate climbing all morning at the thought of every eye in the garden turning to her. Downstairs, Cody never sat down: flowers, tables, the last of a vision he had been carrying for four months.
The groom
Dark brown suit, and not a still moment in him. He and his friends built the ceremony space themselves — chair by chair, the drapes, the pillars — and he spent the last hours before his own wedding moving between the lawn and the house, finishing it so that everyone else could walk straight into it. Their names and the date are stitched into the lining of his jacket.
The first look, with Dad
Her dad saw her first, before anyone else in the house did. He turned around by the stairs, told her she looked amazing and that he was happy for her, and then told her she was not allowed to cry.
The rain stopped, and
everyone came out to the lawn.
The ceremony
Friday, 6:00It rained an hour before. Not hard, but enough to push everything back — a row of people at the windows, watching the chairs get wet. Then it stopped, the way it does in August, and forty people came out and sat down on the lawn in a half circle, close enough to see every face.
One of their best friends married them. Partway through, the rings went down the rows, warmed hand to hand, so that by the time they came back to the front every person there had held them a moment and prayed a blessing over the marriage — they had seen it done once, at the wedding of friends of theirs the autumn before, and knew that night they wanted it. There was laughing the whole way through it, and there were tears — Cody's, and both sets of parents — and blessings spoken over them from every direction.
As soon as I saw him, the nerves vanished. All I felt was a full heart.
Katrina
At the moment they kissed, the clouds broke and the sun came through onto the lawn. Neither of them saw it. Everyone sitting in front of them did.
Person after person said the same thing afterward: it felt like a sign.
Just the two of us
After the ceremony they went to the far end of the garden for twenty minutes while the light dropped. It was the only stretch of the whole weekend that was just the two of them, and even then the house was in earshot.
Everyone
Everyone in these photos had a hand in the day, and so did plenty of people who are not in them — the ones who sent notes, called that morning, and prayed over this marriage from other homes.
The best weekend of my life. Everyone showed up for us, worked so hard, and we have the best people in our corner.
Cody
Nobody was
going anywhere.
Dinner and cake
Her grandfather prayed over them before anyone ate. Then Brassica, and Mozart's after, most of it eaten standing up at the counter and out on the steps. The cake came out just before dark with the pool going gold behind them — taller than they were expecting, and chocolate under the frosting instead of the vanilla and raspberry they had chosen. It was so good that nobody bothered putting it away.
Heavenly Father, we just thank you and we gather today with grateful hearts and for thanking you for bringing love between Katrina and Cody. We ask that you bless their wedding with courage and grace. Give them laughter in the days that are joyful. Give them courage in the challenges they might face. May there always be a place in their home for you, and may you be their foundation. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.
Papa Ed Hayes, before dinner
The first dance, in the dark
Then the power went out — string lights, music, the whole house. Somebody found a speaker, and they had their first dance under the grape vines in the dark, their best friends holding up phones to light them. No photographer was there for it — these came off their point-and-shoot, in their friends' hands, and they are the ones the two of them look at most.
If you know Cody, you know Hadley had to be brought over for a photo on the most important day of his life. And back home, waiting for Katrina the way they always do, were Tucker and Nova — the two sweetest little loves, who follow her from room to room and were very much on our minds all weekend.
Saturday
August 8Breakfast came from Littleton's, and the cake was still on the counter where they had left it — melted down overnight and better for it, eaten with forks straight out of the middle and scooped into cups all afternoon. The pool was open by mid-morning. Spikeball on the lawn, cards in the shade, the letters from the night before drying on the deck, people still sitting out there at six. The goodbyes ran until dark, because nobody wanted to be the first car down the driveway.
Whoever was still on the deck when somebody said to get in the photo. The grandparents had said their goodbyes earlier, and a few had already started for home.
And then it was Sunday, and Glenmont Avenue went back to being a street. The marriage is the part that keeps going, and you are all in it with us.
Cody & KatrinaThe people who made it
Vendors & credits
The day
Worn
And the ones who set the chairs, ran the errands, warmed the rings and carried the whole weekend on their backs.
We thought about Christian and Nadine in Germany all day, and about Marie and Anel in Michigan with Avi only a few weeks old. Being far from the garden did not make any of them less a part of it.
Almost everything here was taken by Casey Marie. The first dance came off our point-and-shoot, in the hands of our best friends, and Saturday was all of us on our phones.
Still here, if you have asked
The Registry
Thank you — for the weekend, for the notes, for the phone calls from far away. A gift was never expected from anyone, and it still isn't. Some of you have asked, though, so we have left this up: a short list of things for the house, and a fund going toward the first one that will be ours.