On a rainy summer day in August 2022, Simone Gianfrancesco sat with her fiancée overlooking Paradise Pond at Smith College from a bench swing attached to a sugar maple tree — also affectionately known as the “swing tree.”
While Gianfrancesco said her wife had proposed to her a year prior at the Columbia River Gorge in Portland, Oregon — Gianfrancesco nervously prepared to propose as the two sat together on the Northampton college campus sharing an umbrella as the rain poured around them.
