A Cornfield Proposal Leads to Wedding Plans

MANCHESTER - Kali Rose Pillard of rural Ryan didn't really feel like going out for dinner. So what if mom suggested, more than once, that she shower. It was only a date with Jed Meeker, her longtime boyfriend. He'd understand if she kept her hair tied back, didn't change out of her T-shirt and jeans, suggested they stay home.

"What's up?" Jed said, surprised that Kali Rose wasn't ready to go.

"I don't feel like going out," she said.

"OK," Jed said, But, thinking on his feet and since it was harvest season, he said he needed to pick up some combine parts at Dennis Hogan's farm where he worked. "Why don't you ride along?"

Kali agreed since the Hogans were her friends, too. But, as they approached the rural Coggon farm, every buildings was dark.

"That's OK," Jed said. "I think he's at the north field." Then Jed became excited. "Hey, I've got to show you what Dennis and I did."

"OK," Kali Rose said.

Jed guided the pickup off the main road into a cornfield and down a waterway. Some of the corn had been leveled.

"Isn't this cool?" Jed said. "Dennis and I have been driving around making a corn maze."

Kali looked around. It didn't mean much to her.

Jed stopped the truck. He climbed out and urged her to follow. He dropped to one knee.

"You said you'd never marry me if it wasn't in the middle of a cornfield," he said.

"You're frickin' kiddin' me," Kali said.

Jed smiled. "Will you marry me?"

"Ha, ha, ha," Kali Rose laughed. "You're kiddin'"

Jed pulled out a diamond ring. "I'm serious," he said. "Hurry up and put it on before I drop it."

Kali did that day, Sept. 10, 2010. And this Sept. 1, in that same cornfield, she and Jed will marry.

"I always told him I'd never marry him unless it was in a cornfield," laughs Kali Rose, 22, human resources director at the Good Neighbor Society home in Manchester. "I didn't know he'd go through with it."

But Jed, 25, an industrial maintenance mechanic at Red Star Yeast in Cedar Rapids, had asked her parents a week earlier if he could marry their daughter. He enlisted one of her best friends, Kelsey Heims of Cedar Rapids, to help pick out the ring. And since then, he's worked with Dennis to sod and groom an area of the cornfield for a wedding with 200 guests.

"That'll be the perfect time," Kali Rose smiles, "when the corn is just starting to change color."

Kali Rose has picked out her wedding dress, completed most of the arrangements and can't wait for the day. It's something she never imagined eight years ago when Jed, a good friend of her brother, Kyle, called out of the blue to ask if she wanted to hang out.

Again, at her mother's urging, Kali Rose said OK. She and Jed drove to Cedar Rapids for a movie but, when the line was too long, they picked up a pizza and watched a movie at her parents house.

Their next date was July 4 to see the fireworks. They've been together since.

"I couldn't get rid of him," Kali Rose jokes today.

But, nothing could be further from the truth. This will be it, as the folks at the Good Neighbor home say, "The field of her dreams."

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