The Girl Next Door

We met when she was four and I was one. I would marry “the girl next door”…sort of. Our families leased summer cabins next to each other The two cedar cabins on Barney Point in Colchester were still in great shape and had withstood the harsh Vermont weather since 1928.  Vermonters referred to these dwellings as camps, but they were actually rustic, summer, lake houses. The builder made dining room tables, benches, rocking chairs, and a porch swing out of the cleared cut cedars from the joint lot. My dad began leasing this camp for us in 1949.

Martha, my future wife, summered in the neighboring camp with her huge family. She was number nine out of eleven, first girl after five boys. She liked to hang around with my cousin Megs, and did not have too much interaction with me. She and Megs were too cool to be seen hanging around with us younger kids. That all changed as we got older. 

In the summer of 1976, she came to the camp visiting from San Francisco where she had been working at the PBS Station KQED. She saw my friends and me hanging around outside of our camp’s front porch, didn’t recognize me, and asked her Mom, “Who is that over there?” Her Mom replied, “Why it's John.” 

Martha thought to herself, “Hmm, John certainly grew up.”

From Friends to Forever

I am such a hopeless romantic and I love the idea of collecting love stories so I (humbly) submit my own:
 In the fall of 2005, I was a senior in college with a wonderful boyfriend, a great house and big plans to go to law school. Then Hurricane Katrina hit and my whole world turned upside down. On a somewhat irrational, and emotional whim I decided to become a volunteer teacher in the Republic of Marshall Islands.
I was assigned to the island of Majuro and placed in a house with 10 other volunteers, nine girls and one guy--Dave. To be perfectly honest, I thought he was cute but...
I found him super annoying. In reality, we couldn't have been more different, Dave spent the year planning a year-long trip to Thailand and I spent it applying to ivy league law schools. That being said, we were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean living in a country with no television and limited internet access so there were a lot of late-night conversations and long walks on the beach.