A thousand pumpkins carry the day for would-be groom
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SUNDERLAND - John Laing and Ariel Baruch went for a leaf-peeping drive Saturday.
When the couple reach the top of Mount Sugarloaf, they looked down at a field where a thousand pumpkins spelled out "Ari Please Marry Me."
"It was a lot of pumpkins," said Laing, 25. "She was speechless for a good 30 seconds."
But Baruch, 23, said yes, she reported Sunday.
"I was just staring at him and crying," Baruch said. "I knew it would happen someday."
Laing had spent part of Thursday and all of Friday setting up the approximately 80-foot letters in the nearly one-acre field owned by Warner Farms, the site of Mike's Corn Maze.
Laing works for an insurance company in New York City. Baruch is a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts. The two met while attending highschool in Tampa, Fla.
Laing said he knew he wanted to write his marriage proposal in a field, so he approached Warner Farms owner Mike Wissemann several weeks ago. Wissemann enlisted the help of maze designer William Sillan.
Sillan was going to mow the message into the grass field, but Wissemann said he suggested using the 12 bins of pumpkins he had just harvested instead.
"John was not used to hauling pumpkins around all day, so he was pretty whipped," Wissemann recalled.
When Sillan went out Friday afternoon to see how Laing was doing, he reported that Laing told him 'Everything I ever wanted is in this field.'"
"It was great," Wissemann said. "But next time I think we might charge for this."
Laing said the couple is considering a 2011 wedding.
As for all those pumpkins, they're still in the field and Wissemann is selling them.
"It's a pick-your-own marriage proposal patch," he said.
Matt Pilon can be reached at mpilon@gazettenet.com.
Comments
woo-dang!
This one the most creative use I seen for punkins since... well, nevermind. Good job city-boy.
marriage traditions
I think it's important to look at where these marriage "traditions" come from and what they stand for. For example, the groom asking the bride's father for the bride's hand in marriage is based on the times (not so long ago) when women were legally property like cattle, Asking for the bride represented an agreement for the transfer of legal ownership of that woman from one man to another. Not exactly a tradition to be proud of. I fully support loving consensual relationships between equals. Many of these traditions do not represent equality, which is certainly not just a feminist concept.
"tradition"
What tradition? A pumpkin patch proposal is wonderfully unorthodox and creative. And by the way, "knew it would happen some day" needn't necessarily mean the man proposing itself but the actualgetting married -- and/or woman's doing the proposing, and her now fiance just did it first.
miltonst
I think you need to get over yourself. So, do we now not live in the happy valley, but the feminist valley instead? If someone were to put a traditional opinion out there and criticize a non-traditional family, they would be condemned. So what makes it right for you to put a non-traditional opinion onto a traditional happening? I think the narrowmindedness you have put forth is the sad thing.
sad?
can't people just be happy for people? sad? our parents and their parents and their parents were raised on traditions. What is wrong with being traditional "in this day and age"?
pumpkin proposal
What a fun way to propose. But how sad that in this day and age, a woman felt she had to wait for a marriage proposal ("I knew it would happen someday") rather than just proposing marriage herself.
I don't think it's sad, it's
I don't think it's sad, it's just a different way of living, of seeing things. Just because it doesn't align with your point of view, doesn't make it sad. Maybe she wanted him to propose to her and it's that simple.