Coping with change: Couple scales down wedding due to COVID-19

When Wriley Herring and Maddie Boggs got engaged in April 2019, they began planning their dream wedding. The date they chose was March 28, 2020.

Maddie and her mom spent months planning and preparing. They had booked the Reserve at Bluebird Hill in Knoxville and planned an outdoor ceremony on the horse farm with 175 guests.

Two weeks before their wedding, everything had to be canceled.

“It was all done, then it was not there,” Maddie said. “I was a blob for like a week ...but you can’t really change anything during a global pandemic.”

The couple, who began dating in high school and graduated from Oak Mountain in 2015, thought about postponing to a later date, but because they didn’t know how long the COVID-19 pandemic would last, they decided to keep their wedding date and change their plans.

“Thinking we might have to postpone up to a whole year at that point, we decided we would rather go ahead and have it with just our families,” Wriley said. “We are definitely glad we made the decision we made. It was tough to deal with and a very stressful two weeks.”

The couple did marry on their original date of March 28, with an outdoor ceremony at Pursell Farms. They were surrounded by their immediate family members: Wriley’s parents and two brothers and sister and Maddie’s parents and her two sisters.

Maddie’s uncle was supposed to officiate the wedding, but he lives in South Carolina and his job wouldn’t allow him to travel across state lines due to COVID-19, so a Herring family friend performed the ceremony. Another friend of the family was there to capture photos.

Maddie did her own hair and makeup. For music, they used a speaker and played some of the songs they had originally planned to via Spotify.

After the ceremony, the couple spent several days at Pursell Farms for their honeymoon. The original honeymoon Wriley had planned was a surprise for Maddie.

“We were going to go to Europe — fly into France, spend four days on a Greek island and a few days in France. She had no idea,” Wriley said. “That got canceled before the wedding.”

Once the honeymoon was over, the couple was quarantined in their home in Hoover for their first two months as husband and wife. Maddie went back to her job as a rehab tech at Grandview Medical Center the beginning of May, and Wriley went back to his job at B.F. Goodrich in Tuscaloosa on May 18.

They hope to have a belated reception with family and friends in the future — possibly even on their first anniversary. They also hope they get to take their honeymoon trip to Europe.

“We wanted to have a celebration with family and friends, but it’s better to look down the road and think back and know you kept people safe and didn’t try to push the boundaries,” Wriley said. “You can have a small wedding and it still be fantastic. When things settle down, we can have a celebration with family and friends and be safe and not put anyone at risk.”

Like many other couples who had to change their wedding plans during COVID-19, Wriley and Maddie will definitely have a story to tell.