3 days

ALTHOUGH NOT A HUGE FAN OF COUNTDOWNS, I have decided to count down to my friend Emily's wedding, at which I will be a hostess. I will count down to her "big day"—she hates this phrase—with wedding-related media.

Before the official countdown begins, you can view a selection of photos from Emily's recent lingerie shower, hosted by our mutual longtime friend Tiffany, at her and her husband's home in Spring, to which I happily carpooled. The bride-to-be's older sister promptly left after one too many sumptuous bustiers emerged from their Victoria's Secret and Frederick's boxes. The future sister-in-law gave Emily a Victoria's Secret gift card, for obvious reasons.

One of my favorite pastimes when I'm at my parents' house is to look at old photo albums. I often find myself, sitting Indian style on the carpet, hunched over piles of mismatched photo albums. Some of the albums' pages have yellowed considerably. Some have completely come unbound. Yet, the photos remain carefully arranged underneath the sheets of thin plastic.

In my sister's baby album, fortunes on small white paper rectangles from long eaten fortune cookies whimsically adorn the margins. The rounded edged photos, now tawny in color, slide off the pages on which they once adhered.

Somewhere in the pile of photo albums lives the wedding photo above of my paternal grandparents, taken in 1943, in the city of Yong'an in Fujian. Three years later, my father was born in Shanghai. Another son and three girls followed.

If you turn the photo over, you see it is actually a postcard, which I imagine they had made and sent to a number of people with a message of the "Just Married" variety. In fact, having a small wedding (though, according to my father, his parents' wedding was a rather large celebration) followed by mailing out wedding photo-postcards sounds kind of nice.

For whatever reason, this particular wedding photo-postcard was never sent and, sixty-five years later, ended up in the hands of their granddaughter.