When I became a Quaker, I learned they referred to the months of the year by their number — First Month, Second Month, and so on — rather than by their customary titles, which stem from the names of pagan gods. June, for instance, is named for Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth, which explains why June is the most popular month for weddings. My wife is Methodist, so our wedding invitations read June 2, and not Sixth Month, Second Day. I didn’t argue, because any time people are bringing me presents, I want to make sure there is no confusion on the date.
Our wedding and honeymoon were undertaken with a sharp eye on finances. Her mother sewed the dresses and cooked the dinner, which was served on a hay wagon in the side yard of my wife’s family farmhouse, now our home. Since I was a Quaker, we weren’t charged to use the meetinghouse, and the Quaker minister waived his fee … after telling Joan she was making a mistake marrying me. While Quakers are generally kind-hearted, they can also be brutally honest.
People once believed June weddings promised fertility and good fortune. We’re not superstitious, so that’s not why we married in June. Our landlords gifted us a week in June at their cabin in Colorado for our honeymoon, which inspired our timing, a free honeymoon being nothing to sneeze at. The drive from Indiana to Colorado was 1,200 miles, which we drove in a Honda Civic without air-conditioning in shirt-sticking-to-the-seat record heat. It was our first car, and we saved $825 by not ordering air-conditioning, a decision we regretted every summer for the next ten years.
My car before that was a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle, which lacked not only air-conditioning but also heat. Now cars have heated and cooled seats, a luxury I can’t imagine. In lieu of heated seats, I wear long johns when the mercury dips. Heated seats are a $1,000 upgrade, and I can buy Fruit of the Loom long johns for $13, so I’ll let you guess my preference.
The long johns come off when the Indiana cold breaks, and by May I’m down to shorts, T-shirts, and sandals. As a matter of principle, my wife won’t let us use our central air until the Fourth of July, so the windows are propped open. If June nights are too hot, I sleep in the hammock in our screenhouse. The night breeze blows unimpeded down the valley in which our farmhouse sits. The frogs croak at the creek, the swallows fuss in the screenhouse soffits, and if I lie just right, I can watch the airplanes descend toward Louisville 60 miles away. I think about the people on the airplanes and wonder why they’re going to Louisville. Perhaps to a wedding.
Flying to a wedding combines the two most dreadful experiences conceived in the mind of man — air travel and weddings. As a pastor, I perform a half-dozen or so weddings a year. If the couples ever knew how much I hated weddings, they would find another pastor, except most pastors I know dislike weddings as much as I do. Now the trend is to have a friend buy pastoral credentials at an internet church and officiate the wedding, a development I welcome. In fact, it might be the greatest thing the internet has ever done for us — the ordination of anyone with $20 and a computer. If this trend continues, May and June might soon become my favorite months.
Philip Gulley is a Quaker pastor and author of 22 books, including the Harmony and Hope series, featuring Sam Gardner.
This article is featured in the May/June 2026 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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