Sentinel staff

Last summer, Heather Brodie Avery, 35, and Dan Elwood Stockwell, Jr., 33, made their minds up to elope at the last minute. They married in Antrim on Sunday, July 16, at an outdoor ceremony on a clear summer evening under the light of a full moon.

Elopement preparations needed to be made quickly...

Wedding dress? Avery says, "All of a sudden the afternoon of the wedding I thought, hey, I need a dress. I'm a bride!"

What's a girl to do? Heather, a craftsperson who owned The Beady Eye bead shop in Keene, grabbed an antique crocheted tablecloth, quickly crocheted two straps to add to it, and voila, produced a chic wedding dress like one her great grandmother might have worn had she been a flapper.

Avery picked brown-eyed Susans from her garden and wove them into the crocheted neck of her dress for an impromptu necklace. She plaited flowers in her hair. She made the groom a Yankee cottage garden version of a Hawaiian lei to wear with his white shirt and blue jeans. Shoes? No problem, go bare foot.

Guest list? Five other people attended the ceremony. The two witnesses were her landlords, Ruth and Russell Weber, pressed into action after returning home on the 16th from a camping vacation. Avery says, "I asked them, 'What are you guys doing today?' " Emma, the Weber's daughter, was the flower girl; her brother, Kyle, was ring bearer; and a friend of Heather's from work, Jeff Pederman, a newly appointed justice of the peace, performed his first wedding ceremony.

Wedding preparations? Ruth baked a cake. Emma gathered rose petals to strew. Jeff distilled morning dew to bless the wedding rings. And, Russell, Kyle, and Dan smiled a lot.

Wedding site? The Weber's backyard where Heather had been renting the Weber's carriage house. Heather says, "I had found a special place when Russell and I worked in the yard. We were trimming dying junipers off a rock. When we were finished, I hosed the rock down. It was an incredibly beautiful rock, a gathering place, a Zen rock."

After the wedding, the Stockwells wanted family and friends to know about their wedding and how they were doing. Some of her family had never seen him and vice versa. Making copies of pictures and sending them all over costs lots of money for a beginning couple. So, the Stockwells took to the Internet to help them out. Their wedding site is simple but beautiful.

The basics are there: eight pictures of the wedding ceremony and a link to e-mail either of the Stockwells.

Their wedding announcements contained the URL to locate the elopement site. Heather says, "The reaction to the site is way cool. We have had about 50 responses."

Age hasn't figured into the acceptance of the elopement site with Avery's grandmother enjoying the pictures once someone showed her how to download them.

Dan, whose job with a major sports company includes Web site maintenance, made their free elopement site at www.yahoo.geocities.com.

He says, "I had heard a lot about Geocities. I am not an active user of the Geocity community, but I wanted to able to share our pictures with relatives. The site had easy tools with all the information there to help you set up the site. If you don't understand what to do, there are a zillion places to get help. There are strings of chats for people who need help. I didn't chat myself, but I looked at the archived conversation strings. I used procedures like cut and paste. I scanned in the pictures."

Now that the Stockwells have had this success with a Web site, they are going to make a commercial site for Heather's craft work. She is planning on taking an HTML (hypertext mark-up language) course. Dan says, "Each separate thing, like making our Web site, feeds into every other thing. Each opens up doorways and reveals itself everywhere."

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