And for the bride, a tractor

Boston Globe

a day ago

'I had never taken anybody there, and I always knew that it was a place that was really special,' he says.
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Emma was the smart, attractive, 23-year-old PhD student enrolled in the UMass Amherst resource economics program where he was starting his master's degree. When she had agreed to go out, he knew cancelling wasn't worth the risk.
Emma packed turkey sandwiches from the campus dining hall (consistently
Emma said she was too excited to notice anything strange about Andrew's behavior. The two had flirted for weeks in the computer lab, getting to know each other while doing homework.
While quickly smitten, she wasn't impressed by Andrew at first; he skipped their cohort's pre-semester summer math camp session without notice.
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'It was like, 'Oh, you think you're better than us?'' remembers Emma, who had moved from her native Albuquerque to Amherst that August. 'It turns out that he was literally working in the hayfields because it's summer time, and when you're a farmer, you can't not do that.'
His father owns
After they met, Emma's initial skepticism dropped as he asked, in earnest, about her travels and studies. They helped each other with school work and discussed their shared passion for their subject area.
Andrew was drawn to economics in an entrepreneurial sense — 'I enjoy the level of pragmatism' — while Emma was interested from an academic and policy standpoint. The commonality translated into a shared lens as they began to date.
'Whenever we experience anything or we go to something cool, on the drive home, it's always like, 'How does that business work?'' she says. 'Like, I wonder how they make money doing that.'
Being together felt natural; they were an official couple by that winter. Andrew was enrolled in
Emma's PhD program consisted of two years of coursework and three of independent research. One year of distance was doable, he remembers thinking. As they approached year three, he hoped they could find a home base somewhere in the middle. But when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down campus, Emma traded her Amherst apartment for a family farmhouse with Andrew and his two roommates and high school friends, Jack Ritchie and Jessica DiLorenzo.
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They raised baby goats and brought his GoPro to the Crane Estate. They'd hop into their cars to show Emma the places from their childhoods. Andrew grew his company,
When restrictions lifted, their roommates moved out; a tabby cat, Frida, had moved in. The couple remained, as Andrew likes to say, 'parallel lines.'
When they had first discussed a shared future, Andrew took out a piece of paper and drew 'stick figure Emma and Andrew' with two parallel lines.
'It really threw me because I'm super literal,' says Emma, who is now an economist for a consulting firm in Cambridge. 'I went to the math definition of parallel — 'two planes moving towards infinity, never shall they meet.' I thought he was trying to say, 'We're just too different.'"
His intent, however, was metaphorical: 'I wanted us to be intensely independent people and have our own agency to do things,' Andrew explains. 'There's never an assumption that either one of us was going to deeply compromise without talking it through.'
'We're together because we're parallel. We're not diverging,' adds Emma.
The concept drove the relationship onward and would appear in Emma's vows when they wed years later.
On Dec. 22, 2023, Andrew proposed at 36,000 feet on a connecting flight from Denver to Albuquerque.
He made arrangements with the airline, and when the seatbelt sign went off, a flight attendant announced: 'On this trip to Emma's hometown to see her family, Andrew has a special question.'
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The couple maneuvered to the aisle and their fellow passengers cheered as Andrew took a knee, pulling a ring from a Husqvarna earplugs case.
'I was surprised ... [but] this is
so
Andrew," says Emma. 'Andrew curates really fun, surprising things for everyone in his life.'
Emma, now 31, and Andrew, 30, wed on May 2 in a ceremony at
Guests sipped lavender gin and tonics and green chile margaritas as they roamed exhibits and the museum's theater that screened home movies Andrew had captured over the years — including the mid-flight proposal, courtesy of the Southwest Airline staff.
Emma's father, Mark, is an engineer and he and his partner, Tera, had constructed a colorful stained glass archway for the ceremony. They then transported the arch to Massachusetts, where a second reception was held at
On June 7, it was a family meal for 200
:
sugar cookie ice cream sandwiches from
Andrew gave closing remarks that he coordinated with his father, Gary, beforehand.
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About a year before the wedding, he bid on a 1939 Allis-Chalmers model B tractor at an estate sale. Emma's grandfather, a Pennsylvania farmer, was an antique tractor hobbyist, Allis-Chalmers being his favorite. (The Shepherds are a John Deere family.)
The family fixed up the persimmon-colored model B, and when Andrew neared the end of his speech, he texted Gary: 'Go.'
'You could hear him start up in the distance,' remembers Andrew.
As his father drove by the tent, the groom delivered it home: 'Emma, you know, if you're going to be part of the family, you're going to need your own tractor.'
The newlyweds rode off into the field — Emma laughs, 'very slowly.'
Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer and editor in Boston. She can be reached at