SEQUIM — They met thanks to that postmodern matchmaker, the Internet. They got engaged in the middle of an old-fashioned party: Saturday’s 111th Irrigation Festival Grand Parade.
Jesse Picard, who rode in the Iraqi Freedom veterans’ car, in dropped to one knee at about 1 p.m., before his girlfriend, Ashlee Gustason — and a crowd of spectators.
She said yes.
“I was very surprised. I cried,” Gustason, who is deaf, said through her interpreter and husband-to-be.
Picard, a Sequim native who served two tours in Iraq — first with the U.S. Marine Corps and then with the National Guard — said he’s known for a while that Gustason is the woman for him.
Figuring it out was simple.
“Being with her makes me really happy,” said Picard, 24.
His fiancee boiled it down a little more.
“He makes me smile,” Gustason said when asked how she knew this was The One.
Picard got the parade proposal idea a few nights ago.
“I was lying in bed, trying to think of something, and it came to me,” he said.
The couple looked, well, blissful as they sat with the groom’s mother, Deanna Picard, and watched the rest of the parade.
Deanna said she suspected a proposal was near — “I knew he was out ring shopping” — but she didn’t expect it would be this public.