Tarrytown Couple’s Leap Day Engagement As Upside Down As 2020 Itself

TARRYTOWN, NY — When Jody Rohlena looks back on it, it’s somehow fitting her Leap Day 2020 engagement was as upside down as the world turned out to be later that year.

Everything about Rohlena and Cedric Smith’s Feb. 29, 2020, engagement was backward, in reverse order, “the cart before the horse,” Rohlena told Patch. The Tarrytown couple had been together 12 years at that point and Rohlena had for all purposes been a mother to Aiden, Smith’s now 18-year-old son.

Their wedding plan was writing itself in the Leap Day conversation four years ago. They would get married in the spring, in Rohlena’s hometown church in Anamosa, Iowa. It wouldn’t be a huge affair — she was 53 at the time, and he was 47 — but returning to her Midwest roots would make it easier for family to attend.

Something was missing, though: A proposal and official engagement.

“Generally,” Rohlena said, “you get engaged before you plan your wedding.”

She said as much to Smith.

“He laughed and said shyly, ‘Are you saying you would like for me to ask you to marry me?’ I said, ‘it would be nice.’ I sat on his lap, he asked me to marry him and I said yes,” Rohlena recalled.

Aiden took note of the reverse order of things, too. When his father told Aiden he and Rohlena we’re getting married, the boy was surprised.

“He always thought his dad would come to him with a secret, ‘I want to ask Jody to marry me,’” Rohlena said.

The COVID-19 pandemic that brought everyday life to a screeching halt — and threw the $72 billion wedding industry into chaos — was still just a whisper.

“We weren’t sure what was happening,” Rohlena recalled. “We thought something was coming up, so we planned our trip for April. We had plane tickets, had spoken to the minister, and had a place for the rehearsal dinner — something smallish, but still very special.”

The wedding was planned to the nth degree, right down to the bow on the back of the Rohlena’s delicate pink gown. She had a clear picture in her mind of an intimate, pre-ceremony moment between mother and daughter.

“My mother ties a beautiful bow,” she explained.

Rohlena’s first indication that “maybe this is going to be a little funky” was when the bridal shop where she’d found her dream dress prodded her to order a couple of backup dresses in case shipping was delayed. They had doubts Smith’s suit would arrive on time.

They soon realized that travel was out of the question, even if the wedding venues they’d selected were still available, as the worst U.S. health emergency in more than a century gripped the country.

After a dozen years as a family, Rohlena, an editor at Reader’s Digest, and Smith, an IT specialist at Apple, decided they weren’t going to let the pandemic stop them and they would have the best ceremony they could under the circumstances. After all, they told themselves at the time, it was just a placeholder wedding, they had told themselves.

The couple married on April 16, 2020, almost alone on a pier on the Hudson River in Sleepy Hallow. The town mayor officiated and Aiden was the entire wedding party. A handful of friends witnessed the ceremony from a safe distance.

Rohlena had “a droopy bow, tied by a 14-year-old boy who did the best he could,” she said. It was still a lovely pre-wedding moment to be shared years in the future, perhaps made more special because Aiden stepped in and did things like help style her hair and tie her bow.

Even pulling off the bare-bones wedding had been a feat as supply lines knotted and all but essential workers hunkered down in their homes.

“Trying to order a suit for our teenage son …” Rohlena began. “I didn’t know his measurements, or how to measure for a suit. We were ordering things online because we couldn’t go into stores. The first belt we ordered was awful, stiff leather. We couldn’t even go into a store to buy a belt.”

The pandemic had interrupted government offices, too. Routine business once handled on a walk-in basis moved to appointment only.

“We could barely find a place to get a marriage license,” Rohlena recalled. “It was very hard. We showed up at the appointment to get our marriage license, and the clerk said we were mistaken.”

The appointment had been the week before, the couple were told. They would have to reschedule. There wasn’t time, they told the clerk. Their wedding was in a few days, on a Thursday.

“I almost had to beg,” she said. “I was wondering, ‘Are we ever going to pull this off?’ ”

Despite the logistical challenges, it was a dream wedding in ways Rohlena could not have imagined. While she had told herself, “this isn’t our real wedding, it sure was,” she said. “It felt very real.”

The sky was a gorgeous shade of blue with puffy clouds— “a beautiful, beautiful day,” Rohlena said. And as it turned out, a late-season snowstorm blanketed the area of Iowa where the couple had originally planned to get married.

They made their union official on April 16, 2020, almost alone on a pier on the Hudson River in Sleepy Hollow. The town mayor officiated and Aiden was the entire wedding party. A handful of friends witnessed the ceremony from a safe distance.

Socially Distanced Driveway Reception

Back at home in Tarrytown after the ceremony, a speaker in the driveway played music loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Rohlena danced in the driveway, first with her husband and then with her son. Neighbors danced in their own driveways. Some blew bubbles. Rohlena and Smith toasted their love for each other with champagne and had some of the cake Aiden had baked.

It was elegant simplicity, a slice of joy when life was upended.

“I thought I would feel cheated,” Rohlena said, but “once we were standing there, exchanging our rings, it felt really cool. It didn’t feel like, ‘Where is our party?’ We didn’t lose thousands of dollars in deposits like other people did.

“Even my mom said, ‘You did the right thing. You had a beautiful day.’ No one was guilting us for doing anything but moving ahead.”

The couple plan to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary in April, of course. But Leap Day 2024 gives them “the opportunity to create a tradition, a special thing that happens every four years,” Rohlena said.

A champagne toast will be included, “but beyond that, I’m going to leave that to him,” she said of her husband. “Since I nudged him to ask me to marry him, he can surprise me on our engag-a-versary.”