Read more from The Big Day, The Boston Globe’s new weddings column.
On his first date with Emma Grazier, Andrew Shepherd was dealing with a real pain in the rear.
Weeks earlier in fall 2017, he had noticed a sharp pain on his tailbone, painful enough to force him to stand while riding his bike and shift his weight from side to side when sitting through lectures at UMass Amherst. The campus health center diagnosed him with a pilonidal cyst, a skin growth near the tailbone that, when infected, requires removal.
But Andrew, then 22, had been the one to suggest the oak-shaded spot for a famously seated activity, a picnic. It was atop a hill by Amherst’s North Fire Station, where he had been Student Force Deputy Chief as a UMass undergrad.
“I had never taken anybody there, and I always knew that it was a place that was really special,” he says.
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. He was in pain but he didn’t want to cancel.
Emma packed turkey sandwiches from the campus dining hall (consistently ranked as one of the best in the country); Andrew put down a blanket. To mitigate the pain, he reclined on his side, like “paint me like one of your French girls,” Emma remembers.
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 hadn’t been impressed by Andrew at first; he skipped their cohort’s pre-semester summer math camp session without notice.
“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 Shepherd Family Farm in Townsend, making Andrew the fifth generation of hay and turkey farmers.
After their classes began, Emma’s initial skepticism faded 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.
“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 UMass’s 4+1 program, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degree in five years. He graduated in May, and in October, returned to Townsend, an hour-plus drive from Amherst.
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/high school friends, Jack Ritchie and Jessica DiLorenzo.
The housemates raised baby goats and brought Andrew’s GoPro to the Crane Estate. They’d hop into their cars to show Emma places from their childhood. Andrew grew his company, Bayberry Hill Water Co., a water jug distributor, and helped on his family’s farm.
As restrictions lifted, Jack and Jess moved out; a tabby cat, Frida, moved in. The couple remained, as Andrew likes to say, on “parallel lines.”
When they 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, 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 turned off, a flight attendant announced: “On this trip to Emma’s hometown to see her family, Andrew has a special question.”
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 Explora Science Center in Albuquerque. Jess and Jack co-officiated and led a “community vow,” in which their 76 attendees pledged to support the couple, who said their “I do”s.
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 Airlines staff.
Emma’s father, Mark, an engineer, and his partner, Tera, constructed a colorful stained glass archway for the ceremony. They then transported the arch to Massachusetts, where the couple held a second reception at Old Harbor Farm, another Shepherd Family Farm property in Townsend.
On June 7, it was a family meal for 200: meatball sliders, made with Shepherd Farm turkeys by Il Forno in Lunenburg; sugar cookie ice cream sandwiches from Cherry Hill, which is owned by Andrew’s uncle. Guests lassoed a sawhorse, explored the grounds, and ate their way through seven rounds of appetizers. Pastor Shayna Appel, the Townsend Fire-EMS chaplain, where Andrew is now a volunteer, gave a blessing.
Andrew coordinated his closing remarks with his father, Gary, beforehand.
About a year before the wedding, Andrew 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 manufacturer. (The Shepherds are a John Deere family.)
With the help of his uncle and father, Andrew fixed up the persimmon-colored model B, and when he 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 brought his speech 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.”
Read more from The Big Day, The Boston Globe’s new weddings column.
Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer and editor in Boston. She can be reached at rachel.raczka@globe.com.