Wedding of the Year Unites Welch and Cheney

Wedding of the Year Unites Welch and Cheney By M. D. Drysdale

Between them, they have two Vermont homes, eight children, 600,000 constituents and one consuming passion: politics.

Make that Democratic politics.

He’s taking his honeymoon in Washington, D.C. She’s heading to Montpelier for hers. Both are probably more interested in President Barack Obama’s honeymoon period than their own.

The political wedding of the year took place Friday, January 2, joining two popular Windsor County public figures, U. S. Sen. Peter Welch, just elected to his second term, and State Rep. Margaret Cheney—also just elected to her second term.

Although the match seems so natural it could have been foreordained, the big decision and the wedding came very quickly over the holiday season.

Welch and Cheney had known each other socially for years and had friends in common, and they started to see each other occasionally a few years after the untimely death of Welch’s wife, UVM Prof. Joan Smith, in 2006. Cheney, who is divorced, was a Spanish teacher at The Sharon Academy.

She said the two had discussed getting married someday—until "someday" suddenly arrived.

"It just started this Christmas," she told The Herald this week.

"We thought, well, we’d like to have my children at home for the holidays—and why don’t we just get married while they’re all here!"

The service was an intimate one at Cheney’s Norwich home. It was performed by the Congressman’s sister, Sister Maureen Welch, an Ursuline nun, and by Curtis Koren of Brookfield, a colleague of Cheney’s at the Academy.

Attending were not only Cheney’s children, but four of the five Welch children, all of them grown. Cheney’s children include James, 23, a recent Amherst graduate; Catherine, 21, at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and Peter, 17, a senior at Hanover High School.

Future family reunions are going to be pretty lively, Cheney conceded.

In addition to politics, Welch and Cheney share a joy in outside recreation, which in winter means a lot of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, she said.

But political interests run deep in each. Welch was elected state representative almost 30 years ago, in 1980, and later moved to the senate, eventually serving two terms as Senate president before achieving national office in 2006. Cheney, though only elected to legislative office in 2006, had her political interests sharpened through editing a newspaper in California and at The Washingtonian magazine.

"We’ve both been fascinated by politics all our lives," Cheney told The Herald.

"The interesting thing is that I spent years in Washington—I know it better than he does. And he knows Montpelier much better than I do. So we both know each other’s worlds."

They don’t know, however, just where they will live when in Vermont—whether in her Norwich home or his old homestead in Hartland.

Cheney’s last day as a TSA teacher was this week (this was planned beforehand), and she’s off to Montpelier, he to Washington.

"We’re all ready to have a long-distance relationship," Cheney said. You could hear her smile on the telephone.