EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in an intermittent series of love stories, spotlighting both newlyweds and couples celebrating major anniversaries, telling how North Olympic Peninsula couples met, how they knew they’d found the right one and how they navigate over life’s bumps.
11She’d bought a house with a garden in Port Angeles, landed a job as a planner for Clallam County and made many friends, including a guy who’d caught her fancy.
She met him at the Clallam County Family YMCA and invited him over for dinner. Repeatedly. He came, and they had a great time, but Jeff Clark was oblivious.
“I thought we were friends,” Clark said later. “I didn’t think Donella was all that interested in me.”
So Pratt, who also considered Clark an excellent friend, kept secret her interest in snuggling on the couch with him, after dinner, perhaps watching a scary movie.
Then came one bad night, and one good hug.
Pratt went down to the YMCA to see Clark, who is the facility’s janitor.
“He looked tired and sad,” she recalled.
Clark can’t remember why he was so down. He recollects instead that when Pratt saw him, “she came and gave me a big hug. It just felt different.”
Hug — and a scary movie
That was August 2007. Soon after the hug, they watched a scary movie –“28 Weeks Later” — and then “people noticed,” Pratt said, “that we were not just friends.”
That Halloween, she threw a party, and before guests arrived, Clark popped a question that would foreshadow a bigger one the following year.
He said, “Can I tell them you’re my girl?'”
“Her eyes got really big,” Clark recalled.
“I said it was fine. I would love to be his girl,” Pratt added.
After that, Cathy Lear, a colleague of Pratt’s at Clallam County, said she noticed a difference: Her normally cheerful co-worker was now radiant.
“I could see the change in Donella when she said, ‘I’m going to see this guy tonight.’ It’s been that way ever since,” Lear remembered.
The day after Halloween 2008, Clark and Pratt were again headed for a party, and though the pair had very little time to change, Clark asked his girl to walk with him down to Hollywood Beach.
“I thought he was crazy,” Pratt said. “He started asking questions like, ‘Do you really love me,’ and ‘Do you think you could love me forever?'”
Yes, dear, she told him, but we really have to get ready for the party.
“Then he pulls out this ring: his grandmother’s ring.”
Racoon’s high-five
Pratt said yes. Then, as they kissed, a raccoon appeared and “high-fived us,” Clark remembered. It was probably asking for a snack. The couple waved back and went off to the party.
They had no trouble picking a date for their wedding. On July 18, Pratt would turn 31 while Clark would turn 32 — and in 2009, conveniently, their birthday fell on a Saturday.
They made plans to wed at Pratt’s grandmother Hazel Hamann’s beach place on Lake Pend Oreille. That way, they and their families could spend the entire day swimming in the clear water, staying cool in the 100-degree heat until the ceremony at twilight.
Pratt’s mother, Carleen, set to work making her daughter’s dress, a snowy gown with rhinestone straps.
When it came time for Pratt to walk down the “aisle” – a lakeside path through the evergreens — her friend Clea Rome from Port Angeles wrapped her in a hug. The two women heard a ping and saw that one of the bride’s straps had broken off.
Pratt immediately disconnected the other one and floated up to her bridegroom in a stunning strapless dress.
The mayor of Hope, Larry Keith, performed the wedding, and the party moved to the Beyond Hope Resort, where Mr. and Mrs. Clark fed each other wedding and birthday cake.
“She was the most relaxed, chill bride ever,” Rome said later. “No one was uptight,” perhaps thanks to all the prenuptial sunning and swimming.
August party
On Aug. 22, Mr. and Mrs. Clark slipped into their wedding outfits again for a party at the Port Angeles Yacht Club, where the atmosphere was literally chill.
As a brisk breeze blew across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Clark read to his bride the 10 things that made him hers.
“I love the lines in your face from constantly smiling. I love your hugs. I love your mind,” he said.
After seven more, Clark couldn’t quit. “No. 11: I love our friendship, and I know it’s going to be a strong foundation for the future.”
Mrs. Clark was quick with a response. “I’m going to have him read that every month,” she said.
“And we’re going to keep having parties,” like the Halloween celebrations that turned their fate.
The Clarks have had their difficult moments, of course. There was one argument after which Jeff asked Donella if she wanted him to leave — just get out of her life so she could be free of his differing points of view.
Horrified, Donella said no, absolutely not.
“I thought, ‘I can’t have him not be here.’ I couldn’t bear that,” she recalled.
Clark, for his part, said he learned from his grandparents, the late Jack and Myrtle Griffin, how to create and re-create harmony in a household.
Work as a team
“They did a lot of communicating,” he said. “You’re working together as a team. You find a middle ground, and you walk that road . . . and we don’t keep issues to ourselves,” lest they fester and burst open “four years later as huge issues.”
Donella added that her husband, even when he was just a friend, always felt familiar. They both grew up in small towns, she in Hope and he in South Bend in Grays Harbor County.
And since the Clarks were both single when they hit 30, they believed marriage was not to be.
But Jeff held out hope, hope nurtured by his grandparents.
“They went through a lot in their life together,” he said. “And in the end, they were two people, sitting in a room, reading books together. That’s what I want.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
