My wife’s brother is getting (re)married in a couple weeks, and we need to have a modest gift (it’s a third marriage, so no crockpot for this one!). She came across an old photo of her parents’ wedding a few weeks ago, which sparked an idea.
The bride-to-be is really “into” vintage photos, which hang about the house. So we searched out a wedding photo for each of the grandparents, to put with the parents’ photo. The plan is to have them all scanned, turned into matching 5×7 shots, and put into a nice frame. That’s nice, but not the best part.
The two photos show a similar wedding portrait from early last century (the two couples were married about two years apart in the mid-1920s). The groom is seated, while the bride stands slightly behind and to the right, so as to show off the entire length of the white dress and veil. The shots are two different sizes and carry different backgrounds, so at first glance they are quite distinct.
Until you look closely — and I’m apparently the first one to ever do this.
“Sweetie…. come here and look at this,” I invited. She came over and looked. We looked again. We put it under a magnifying glass to confirm.
BOTH grooms are sitting in the same chair. Not just a similar pose, we now realized — the SAME pose. The exact same carved wooden chair, identical down to the little patch of frayed material on the corner of the cushion.
It’s a tiny little coincidence, but really neat to know that these two couples who came from very different worlds — one a pair of second-generation Germans and the other very new immigrants from Slovakia — ended up going to the same place to memorialize their wedding, not knowing that 30 years from that time two of their offspring would meet and marry.
Isn’t that just cool to know?!
And it put me in mind of a little coincidence with our own parents. Early in our relationship, we realized that both sets of parents were married on the same date. It was just a little tiny coincidence that we interpreted as a sign from The Universe that it had some plans for us to be together, all along.
Apparently those happy coincidences go back a couple generations!
So now, I’m wondering what other tiny little message The Universe plants around world. Have YOU come across any meaningful coincidences in your world, lately? Please, share!
