Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

July 7, 2012

Bride hopes for return of bouquet of brooches

The bouquet she carried at her wedding has no value to anyone else, but is priceless to her family.

By MATT HONGOLTZ-HETLING Morning Sentinel

WINSLOW - On what was supposed to be the happiest day of her life, Windsor bride Sara Norton, 31, lost a piece of family history.

Someone appears to have walked away from her wedding site with a bridal bouquet made of brooches.

Sara and Josh Norton were married at 11 a.m. June 30 at the new gazebo outside the Winslow Town Office.

During the ceremony, Norton held a bouquet made up of 50 brooches, many of which had been contributed byfriends and three generations of family members.

"I carried it down the aisle with me and had it during the whole ceremony," she said.

Her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-aunt were all represented, as were the groom's mother and two grandmothers, and other family members and friends, she said.

"I have two daughters and I was hoping to pass it down to them," Norton said.

But once the ceremony ended, Norton put the bouquet on a bench while she and her husband posed for wedding photos. Amid all the excitement, she forgot to pick it up when she headed to the reception at the couple's Windsor home.

Within an hour of the time the bouquet was left on the bench, frantic family members returned to recover it.

But it was gone.

"She cried and cried," said Laura Hall, Sara's friend. "Then she had to set it aside, because she had a reception going on."

At first, they hoped the bouquet would be handed in at the Town Office on Monday.

"It's priceless to me, but it's not valuable to anyone else," Norton said. "It's just costume jewelry. The brooches only cost about a dollar each."

She estimated that she and Hall called the Town Office 20 times Monday, without results.

"I wasn't thinking that someone would just walk away with it," Norton said. "If my kids found it, I would make them take it back."

Now, she said, even though Hall continues to put up posters announcing the loss, her hopes of recovering her bouquet are fading.

She's trying to take it in stride.

"It's like bittersweet," she said. "I'm extremely happy that I'm married and everything, but I'm also sad because I blame myself for leaving it."

The Nortons asked that anyone with information about the missing bouquet to call 872-2776, extension 209.

 

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