"Hey I just found the Valentine's Day gifts that I sent to you when we first met, Mike."
These two pictures will always hold special memories for us of the chance meeting we had that mid-January weekend in 2013. It was one that changed both of our lives for the good.
It surely doesn't seem like 3 years ago now that I took out after school one day and headed 611 miles to the west of my home in Kansas to reconnect with this kid from "the land of long ago, and far, far away". 40 years of time had passed by since each of us were teenagers going to the very same school in the south-central Kansas town of Haven. Now, 4 decades later, we were about to meet up with one another once again.
Looking back now, I see how crazy I was to just take out like that on my own and venture solo to a place that I'd never even seen before. Shoot I didn't even know that people lived west of Denver. It was in the dead of winter, mostly in the dark but even that didn't stop me. I followed Mike's advice to just stay on Highway 50 and keep on going. I'd cross over the Continental Divide at Monarch Pass and before I knew it, I'd be where he was.
I will always remember that first drive out there. Western Kansas was a piece of cake and I had no trouble making it to the border in about 4 hours. Eastern Colorado might as well be western Kansas, so it didn't present any worries either. By about the time I made it to Pueblo, I began to feel a little sleepy and I mentioned it to Mike when I called him. He suggested I just pull over and get a motel room. I'd be able to make it better that way. I decided to keep going on. Next was Canon City and even though it was the very dark of night, about the 10 p.m. hour, I knew that I was really getting into the mountains. The road was a series of one curve after the other and I had absolutely no idea of where I was. I remember seeing the sign announcing the entrance to the Royal Gorge and shuddering for a moment thinking that one wrong move and I'd be at the bottom of that giant abyss looking upward. By the time I made it to Salida, I decided I'd had more than enough and pulled over to sleep for the night.
Early the next morning, about the 4 a.m. hour, I decided to get up and cross the mountain. I called Mike quickly and told him of my plans and he said he'd see me when I got to the other side. When you leave Salida, you are at the base of the mountain and the only way to cross it to get to the other side is straight up and over. It was dark with little light to guide me, but onward I drove. I will never forget the fact that save for one snowplow at the top of the great Continental Divide, mine was the ONLY vehicle on the road. I was never so glad to see that I had made it to the summit of that 11,000 feet + mountain. I was even more happy to make it to the bottom of it. By the time I made the descent and was only a few miles away from Gunnison on the other side, the sun came up and I saw in my rear view mirror the monster of a mountain that I had just crossed for the first time of my life, alone.
I made 4 more trips back to Montrose that spring of 2013 before Mike and I decided that it might be cheaper to get married than to drive back and forth every month :) So we did. On the last day of school, May 21, 2013, in front of all of our families, friends, and the students and staff of Lincoln Elementary, we married one another underneath the basketball goal in the school gymnasium.
988 days later, we are STILL married.
We've been through so much already and 99.9% has been very good. Some people suggested we might be crazy to get married. Some have suggested we were crazy to move to Texas from Colorado. Some (rightfully so) might have thought we didn't know what we were doing to come here with absolutely no job prospect or even a real home to call our own. Yet we did all of those things anyways and now as we look back, one thing seems certain. If we had to do it all over again.......
We would.
No comments:
Post a Comment