Photo by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Vera Miao, left, and Brian Pakizer, right, kiss on the bleachers at Lane Stadium on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The Chester, Virginia couple were married Saturday at The Inn at Virginia Tech.

Photo by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Roxane Hartmann, a resident of Blacksburg, (middle) buys herbs from Bruce and Teresa Caldwell, both are Virginia Tech graduates.

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Photo gallery: See a photo gallery of images from the wedding of Vera and Brian Pakizer Saturday at the Inn at Virginia Tech.

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BLACKSBURG -- Everyone turned to look at the bride. She wore a strapless white dress, a strand of pearls and the beaming face of a young lady walking to meet her groom.

It was Saturday, one year since Brian Pakizer proposed to Vera Miao on one knee, in Chinese, during a meteor shower.

Now, the Virginia Tech graduates were getting married in the same spot where Brian asked Vera to be his wife.

The young couple just never imagined their wedding -- in the grassy courtyard at the Inn at Virginia Tech -- would include satellite trucks and state police.

This is the place where, after Monday's campus shootings, families waited for word on whether sons and daughters, colleagues and friends were alive or dead.

Futures changed forever in this place, here at the inn.

"Right now, we are here to reclaim this place," the Rev. Kelly Sisson said as she began the wedding. "This place is about so, so much more than this past week."

For the couple -- and for so many others in this mountain-ringed town -- life was beginning to move on, as much as it could at the site of the nation's worst shootings in its history.

Couples strolled Main Street on Saturday, hand in hand. Young people sat for haircuts. Diners filled restaurants, eating barbecue from red-and-white checked tablecloths.

Yet acts of normalcy were surrounded by reminders.

Maroon and orange ribbons bloomed from lampposts. Baskets of "cookies for comfort" from Girl Scouts sat in the student union. The Lyric Theatre marquee read "our hearts are with you, VT."

And at the wedding, where the bride carried red roses and orange tiger lilies, and green hills rolled into the horizon, the shooting was there, standing in the shadows.

The couple, born three days apart in August 1981, met in their dorm, West Ambler Johnston -- the site of Monday's first shootings.

And as a friendship grew to courtship through Wal-Mart trips and Scrabble and "Lord of the Rings," Brian -- an engineering major -- always waited for Vera at Norris Hall after class.

Now, fronting the gray, castle-shaped building, where 31 of Monday's 33 deaths took place, memorials form an arc. Thirty-two burning candles, 32 piles of flowers, 32 American flags. Silent crowds gathered at the unwitting attraction, its visitors wearing everything from suits to Tech Mardi Gras beads, and a little boy stood in a VT ball cap eating ice cream.

On the Drillfield nearby, Jim Ladd, 22, and his brother Peter tossed a Frisbee.

"You can still feel this weight on campus," he said on this perfect, 80-degree day.

The biggest reminder, the Tech senior said, is that classes were canceled all week.

Returning Monday will be healthy, he said. Resuming classes, resuming routines. Conversations will inevitably turn from tragedy to grades, homework and tests.

On campus Saturday, the vet school still had its dog wash as planned, where hoses hissed and students shampooed wearing rain boots and Crocs.

Instead of a class fundraiser, profits will go to the memorial fund.

Frank Brown and his wife, Jennifer Grover, came with their dogs -- Rowdy, Rusty and Jacques.

It's time to move on, Grover said. She said that's what the victims would want.

Soon, her husband predicted, the media will leave and the extra police will disappear. Then, "we're supposed to go back to normal.

"Nobody knows what that will be," he said. "Some will go on. Some will be affected for the rest of their lives."

Meanwhile, crowds walked down Main Street in Tech shirts -- always a norm in this football town.

But now, many T-shirts were affixed with black ribbons.

Like so many others, Chris Mason, 35, took pictures of sympathy signs in store windows.

"It's got a little different vibe," the Tech graduate said. "As a resident and alumni, you never expect to hear 'Virginia Tech' and 'massacre' in the same sentence."

Mason noticed what was different -- the memorials, the police. But much of what he saw was the same -- young people tossing footballs, a woman sunbathing.

"Its not like anything didn't happen," he explained. "It's that we're getting back to a normal way of life."

Back at the inn, near where Vera and Brian first held hands while watching meteors on a chilly, November night, the couple stood under a white arch.

Facing each other, they promised to have and to hold from this day forward.

They exchanged vows, exchanged rings, the tiny bride only tall enough to reach her groom's nose.

They kissed when they were wed. Then kissed again. Guests clapped and shouted.

And at ceremony's end, they walked down the aisle together, toward their future.