circa March 2007, one of our first dates in White Rock.
March 6, 2007. The day Graeme and I started dating. I left my dorm room far too early (which was literally a two minute walk from Graeme's apartment), and ended up wandering aimlessly around campus with absolutely nothing to occupy my time. I think I was wearing new jeans. Graeme was taking me to bubble tea (which I had never tried) on a motorcycle (which I had never ridden). It was absurdly sunny outside.
"Actually no. Let's just date." My words, not Graeme's. Goodness I'm a control freak.
So we dated. Everyone rejoiced that we finally got our lives sorted out. Third year ended, we suffered through opposite summer job schedules, fourth year began, we argued about time management, we graduated and began long distance. Graeme moved to Ottawa; I stayed in the lower mainland to finish my BEd and teach for a year.
circa April 2009, my PDP graduation.
March 13th, 2010 (the day after what I thought was a highly-significant alumni hockey game), Graeme asked me to marry him using a Scrabble board and I, obviously, said yes. At this point, we had been dating for more than three years. We continued doing long distance until a few days before our marriage.
Immediately after getting married, we lost our minds and drove across the country: Fort Langley to Ottawa, ten days of driving. Taking the straightest route possible, this trip would have been just under 5,000 kilometers. We didn't have air conditioning, we got really tired of eating food we hadn't cooked ourselves, we sang to a lot of awful 90s pop music. I laughed until I cried/couldn't breathe.
Graeme started his Masters; I continued to work two jobs. We lived in a basement apartment that had both a bathroom that opened into the kitchen and a lot of unpleasant bugs. We went on random road trips every weekend (Montreal, Quebec City, Washington, DC) in our silver plum 1998 Saturn that is still running in spite of it's 300,000+ kilometers.
circa April 2011, Lincoln Monument.
We moved into a third floor apartment with glass doorknobs in a neighborhood that we love. We did this immediately (read: two days) before leaving for a two-week trip to Europe. We watched the lights on the Eiffel Tower turn on at night, rode motorcycles on the narrowest roads through the Swiss Alps, and ran through Cinque Terre in the blistering Italian heat.
I stayed working two jobs while Graeme started his second year of grad school. Two of our best friends from university moved two blocks down the street from us. We became church elders, we spent a lot of time with a baby, and I finally quit my part-time job (only to pick up freelance work immediately afterwards).
circa January 2012, not our baby.
It is now March 2012, and I have been in a relationship with my husband for five years. I don't consider myself a romantic, and I'm generally not been on nostalgia, but I think this is a pretty big deal.
--- chRistie
