A Sunday Love Story (part 1): Red Ruffles and Rat Tails

(This past September marked eighteen years since my husband and I first met, and seventeen years since our first date. Lest you think I'm older than I actually am, I should reveal that I was thirteen when I first laid eyes on him, and he was just a year older.

I've had this constant itch to document our history together, to have it in writing for our children to read someday. Our history is rich and unique and when I look at the last eighteen years (over half of my life), I find myself wanting to analyze what has made our relationship work so well and last so long. Enter the blogosphere: the place for people who are crazy enough to want to make the private public.

How many couples can say they were children together? We met as Mormon teenagers, both from highly active families, and we chose to live the religion as fervently as we were taught: missions, temple marriage, the whole nine yards. Today, we are delightfully confused agnostics who have chosen not to raise our children in the LDS faith. We have been through high school and, collectively, four college degrees together. We have been through challenges and heartbreaks that our history together has helped us survive. I look at where we were then and where we are now and it's easy to forget the in-between, the baby steps that got us from one place to another. I believe it is those baby steps that ultimately make or break a couple.

So here you have it: the first in a series of Sunday posts that tell our story.)

My first look at Oregon was from the sky: sitting in the window seat of an airplane next to my younger brother, Quinn, we both gaped in awe as the wings of the plane somehow brushed past the east slope of Mt. Hood without touching its snowy cap. Quinn held a shoebox delicately in his lap, the temporary home of our pet turtle Herman. Our older brother and parents had driven a U-Haul truck filled with our things two days earlier, our Doberman Sophie sitting between them in the cab of the truck.

We were thirteen and ten. We were flying without adults for the first time in our lives. We were leaving our old home in San Jose and our best friends. We were not strangers to moving, but relocating is a lot harder when you are thirteen than when you are eight. Because a child's sense of herself is so connected to place, so wrapped up in the landscape in which she lives, it felt as if we were leaving our very selves behind as we landed at the Portland airport, even though our parents were waiting with open arms when we stepped out of the concourse and into the next stage of our lives.

We flew in on a Saturday, which meant the next morning we would be attending church for the first time in our new ward. I had fretted about this for the entire week prior to our flight. In the Mormon world, your ward makes up the bulk of your social connections, so I knew how vital it was that I make a good impression. I had a dress packed in my suitcase so that I wouldn't have to dig through boxes to find the right outfit, along with all the appropriate accouterments: hair products, styling tools, shoes, makeup, the works.

If someone had told me while I sat on that plane next to my little brother and our turtle that I would meet my husband the very next day, I can imagine the embarrassed, blushing laugh it would have drawn from me. The very notion itself is ridiculous. I look at that thirteen year old girl now with all the distance of time as if she were someone else. She's only four years older than my daughter is now. She knows nothing about the workings of love and human relationships, and she won't for a long time. But she's about to make a connection that will set her life on a path that will define it completely.

I was a vision that Sunday morning. Seriously. I wore braces on my teeth with those little colored elastics on each metal bracket. My bangs were plastered with hair spray to make them stand about six inches straight up from the top of my head. The rest of my hair was cut into a chin-length bob, besides the rat tail that hung down the back of my neck an extra foot past the rest of my hair. It was plaited into a thin braid with a bead or two at the end. I was proud of my choice of dress: a hand-me-down from my cousin, it was a bright red number with a complex series of ruffles from the gunny-sack waist down to the middle of my calves. We were late to the church that morning, so although we were ordinarily a "back pew" family, we were forced to walk up the center aisle during the opening hymn to the very front pew, a new family on parade. I could feel the eyes on us, sizing us up.

The most important set of eyes I hadn't seen yet. They were Chris'. This is his first memory of me, and I doubt I would recall the day or the outfit or the march to the front pew or, yes, even the rat tail quite as vividly as I do if it weren't for his retelling of the moment he first saw me.

Poor guy had no idea what was about to hit him.

More next Sunday (with hot pics!). . .