The first photograph was taken 14 years ago, on a warm, wet spring afternoon, at a historic church hosting a community celebration. Two 10-year-old children — a boy with sandy hair and black shorts, a girl with a blonde ponytail and a cartoon dog on her white T-shirt — hovered in the moss-green doorway, just beyond the reach of the raindrops. A Washington Post photographer snapped the picture.
Paul and Hollis Riedel posed in that same doorway of John Wesley Church in Waterford, Va. again on Saturday, July 23 — Hollis in a fitted lace gown, Paul in a vest and tie over a blue button-down shirt. This time, it was their wedding photographer who captured the frame.
“It was all very surreal,” Hollis recalled, several days later. “It was so strange to think that we were so little, so young in that first picture, and now we were standing there again on our wedding day.”
Hollis and Paul Riedel pose in the doorway of John Wesley Church in Waterford, Va., where they were once photographed as children. (Eva Fuze)
The two grew up together in Waterford, a small village nestled among Loudoun County’s rolling hillsides with a history dating back to the 1700s. Hollis’s family home was once a Civil War hospital; the house where Paul grew up — just eight doors down — was a storefront in the 1800s.
“There was history all around us, and it was so neat to grow up in that kind of environment,” Hollis said. She and Paul, who became friends when they were 7 years old, would sometimes go up to the historic Waterford graveyard, where they would sit among the Confederate gravestones and try to spook each other, she remembers. They started dating in middle school, she said with a laugh: “Which is to say, ‘middle school dating,’ which isn’t real.”
But years passed, and the affection between the two children did become real. At 15, they carved their initials into the bark of a tree near a small waterfall behind Hollis’s family’s house. They dated through high school and college — Hollis went to the University of Virginia, and Paul attended Virginia Tech. They moved together to Tennessee, where Hollis is a labor and delivery nurse and Paul is a veterinary student. And on Saturday, the couple married at Hollis’s parents’ home in Waterford, in a stately backyard framed by boxwoods.
After the small ceremony, the couple retraced their childhood together, stopping for photographs at a few special landmarks. They held their wedding rings against letters etched in tree bark nearly a decade ago. And they paused in the doorway of the old church where they’d played that April afternoon in 2002, the day the newspaper photographer captured them together.
Hollis and Paul carved their initials into this tree when they were 15. (Eva Fuze)
At their wedding, they were surrounded by the people and places that meant the most to them, Hollis said. The reception was held at the Waterford Old School, a beloved community landmark that was rebuilt after a devastating fire in 2007. Most of the wedding vendors — the band, the florist, the photographer, the hair stylist — were all high school friends.
“Growing up in such a small town, we have such deep connections with all our neighbors,” Hollis said. “It helps with my in-laws, too — they saw me grow up, so they know me very well,” she jokes.
In such a tightknit community, one might think that love stories like theirs would not be unusual. But Hollis doesn’t know of any others.
“Whenever we tell someone our story, they’re amazed,” she said. “They always say — really?”
Below, Hollis and Paul on the front of the April 25, 2002, Loudoun Extra section of The Washington Post:
