SAMMY & VARUN: part i of iii

A bright, sunny, wonderfully excited email from Sammy first landed in my inbox in October 2015. She and Varun had been engaged for a year already. Sammy was living in Richmond, Virginia, fully entrenched in the vicious cycle of pharmacy school that goes a little something like studystudystudyTEST, studystudystudyTEST. Meanwhile, Varun was living in Mississippi, fulfilling his dream of being an Air Force pilot. Because of school, because of the distance, because of the Air Force, and because finding the perfect venue can be really freaking hard, they didn’t exactly have a date… yet. From that very first email, I knew that Sammy and Varun were going to be a wonderful couple to work with. What I didn’t anticipate was how their friendship would take me on one of the biggest adventures of my life. But more on that in a different post. (What a tease!)

Finally, finally, the wedding planning gods got their stuff together and S+V booked a venue close to their childhood homes in Northern Virginia. And finally, finally, it was time to schedule their long-overdue engagement session. Once again, school, distance, and the unpredictability of military life made finding a date for our session trickier than usual, but finally on a crisp Tuesday morning in October of 2016, just after dawn and more than two years after getting engaged, Sammy and Varun were together in their favorite city to document this wild, whirlwind chapter of their lives together. Typically, being more of an exhausted pigeon than an early bird, I try to convince my couples to sway towards an afternoon session, but for S+V, I had a hunch that spending sunrise at the Lincoln Memorial would somehow be worth it. And I was not wrong.

Call it luck. Call it normal weather patterns. Call it Sammy and Varun magic (that’s what I like to go with). But that Tuesday morning in D.C. could not have been a more beautiful setting if George Washington himself had painted the scene. (Was ol’ George a talented painter? Probably.) The fog rolled in as the sun peeked over the Capitol it felt to me like it was just this wonderful pair awake while the whole city slept. So, with plenty of caffeine in my veins, we wandered the iconic Washington, D.C. scene from the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial to Constitution Gardens, where Varun had knelt down two years earlier and asked Sammy the question that set it all in motion.

The story of Sammy and Varun is much bigger than just this. It’s one that took them, and me, and now, soon, you, half way across the world. But for now, enjoy this little celebration of their love and anticipation of spending their forevers together.