Love beats pandemic as couple wed in Stanislaus clerk-recorder’s last civil ceremony
Melissa Welsh and Brenda Tejeda acknowledge this is a crazy time to get married, with life at a standstill because of the new coronavirus.
But the Turlock couple were married Friday in a civil ceremony outside the Stanislaus County clerk-recorder’s office in downtown Modesto, the last marriage the office expects to perform through at least April because of the pandemic.
“Life is not going to wait for us,” Tejeda, 30, said in a phone interview after the ceremony. “And you never know what tomorrow is going to bring.”
The couple’s ceremony was the last of nine marriages the clerk-recorder’s office officiated Friday. The office holds as many as 16 ceremonies on Fridays. The office also is closed to the public because of the pandemic but is providing services by phone, email and other means.
Clerk-Recorder Donna Linder said her office practiced all of the safety guidelines, including limiting the ceremonies to the couple and one witness, holding the ceremonies outdoors, social distancing (except for the couples), the frequent use of hand sanitizer and disinfecting the table and other items used in the ceremonies.
“We did not want to leave our public without an option,” Linder said in an interview, “so we went ahead and did these outside with all these precautions. There are some people who are going to think this was a bad idea. But what are you going to do? You have to help your public.”
The ceremonies also were brief, lasting about 45 seconds each.
Linder said her office will not perform weddings through April and those that had been scheduled will be rescheduled to a later date. She said her office called people who were getting married Friday and asked them whether they could postpone their ceremonies. Several said they could.
In some cases, couples went ahead with their marriages Friday for pragmatic reasons, such as their marriage license was about to expire, Linder said.
Welsh — who now is Welsh-Tejeda — and Tejeda did it for love and decided they could no longer wait until Welsh-Tejeda’s family could afford the trip from their home in Pennsylvania to California for a wedding.
“We were waiting for them,” Welsh-Tejeda, 24, said in an interview. “We came to the realization that we didn’t want to wait any longer.”
Welsh-Tejeda said they had hoped to get married in Los Angeles but quickly realized that was out because of the pandemic. She did some online research to find the easiest way to get married and hit upon the clerk-recorder’s office.
The newlyweds will honeymoon in their Turlock apartment and plan to hold a large gathering for family and friends to mark their wedding once life returns to normal.
“It was just something very simple and about her and I,” Welsh-Tejeda said about the civil ceremony.
This story was originally published March 27, 2020 at 5:18 PM.
