It was a sunny fall afternoon when someone knocked on the kitchen door. I opened it to find an exasperated young man.
“Do Jody and Bridget live here?” he asked.
I assured him that he had found the right place. He sighed with relief. You see – he had been to three other apartments before landing at ours – where, in fact, Jody and Bridget shared a four-bedroom campus apartment with my best friend Kathryn and me.
And that is how I met my husband. I like telling people that he just one day showed up on my doorstep.
Thankfully, he was only friends with my roommates and not romantically interested in them.
That incident happened in October of my junior year of college. By December, we were dating and by the following September (on my 21st birthday) we got engaged. If it seems fast, it is by far a longer relationship than my parents had. My mom met my Dad in October. Three months later, they were married.
My husband and I were actually engaged for a year and nine months before we got married in June 1995. Looking at our wedding picture all I can think is “Boy, don’t we look young.”
So this past week we celebrated our 20 year wedding anniversary. Since we got married, my husband has graduated law school, we have moved four times (living in three different cites), bought two homes (and sold one of them), had two kids (after 10 years of marriage), started our own businesses (he has his own law firm, and I have my Etsy card shop) and I have published four fantasy novels.
Wow. A lot has changed in the last twenty years. We certainly have come a long way. There have been good times and some bad ones. There are a few things that I would do differently and others that I wouldn’t change. Isn’t that always the way it is?
We celebrated our anniversary with a dinner out – eating at the Chart House, the restaurant at the top of the 750-foot-tall Tower of Americas in downtown San Antonio. The restaurant slowly rotates so you get an awesome view of the city.
Dinner out wasn’t our only celebration. In April, we celebrated with a weekend get-away…to Austin. Yes, no exciting destination for us but it was a kids-free weekend with just the two of us which we hadn’t done in five years.
But the celebration I am looking forward to most is our Caribbean cruise in August. My parents are taking us (including the kids) and my brother on an 8-day, 7 night cruise as a joint celebration of our 20 year anniversary and my dad turning 80 in October. It should be fun!
In a world where everyone seems to be getting divorced, staying together for 20 years is quite a feat. And here is to many more years of making memories together!
Into Another World 