Proposal

I am moving back home after six years away. I have always meant to move back home, but now that it is actually happening, I have to say, it is a little frightening. Six years ago I moved away from my hometown in Chicago to go to college in Ohio (I say Chicago, but we are in the suburbs – literally the very last train stop from the city and only about 5 minutes away from the Wisconsin border). Ohio is not that far away, but when you are a poor student, that gas money adds up quickly, so I usually only visited home once or twice a year. In the beginning, I was at school and “home” was Chicago, but as the years passed “home” became synonymous with Chicago and Ohio. It was interesting though, because “home” never became solely Ohio. I love my life in Ohio – I have great friends, a great job, and met the most wonderful guy named Michael that became my fiancé. I have always ridden and worked with horses. In Chicago, I teamed up with my trainer and she let me ride all sorts of project horses – horses that were going to be put down if they did not find a home, ex-racehorses that needed a new start, and horses that were being shuffled around because no one was putting time or effort into them. She always told me, “don’t become a barn manager,” so when I went off to college, I went to become just that. After graduation I came to work at a horse rescue facility and animal sanctuary. I was only supposed to stay for a year to help get them organized, but the facility was beautiful, the people I worked with were great, and I got to see horses every day.

There comes a time, however, that homesickness finally gets the best of you. I missed my family the most – all of my families are very close (my parents are separated, so technically, I have 4 families). If after six years of living in Ohio I still have an Illinois drivers license, license plate, and all of my doctors are still in Illinois – I think it is clear that I never was intending to settle down in the state of Ohio. It is still hard when the time finally comes to actually leave though. I was planning on moving sometime in the late fall, but then I got a call for an office management position – and they wanted me in two weeks! I freaked out. Two days later, I had everything under control and was starting to get excited about the move. The only downside was that Michael was not able to move until the end of the month. Three weeks without him? We are so attached it is not even funny; he once had to travel for work and was gone for 1 week. I had absolutely no idea what to do without him there – in the end I was so beside myself, I ended up painting two of our bar stools in blue and red stripes (he said they were, pause, “Nice. Well, I guess I like them because you painted them”).

I met Michael one Saturday night in May. Some friends of mine found out that I was single and insisted that I should come out that night and meet some of their friends – especially this one guy. I almost bailed about an hour before I said I was going to meet them. I had just gotten out of a long relationship with an even longer breakup and was pretty set on just being single for the rest of my life and only letting people take me out to dinner if I was hungry enough. Looking back now, I am so glad I ended up going. I walked into the bar and spotted my friends, walking over to them, I met a couple other people they were sitting with. Suddenly, the guy running karaoke up front admitted that he had lost a bet and started to sing a really terrible rendition of Adele’s “Someone Like You.” Halfway through the song, and when another guy had come up to kick him off stage and take over, my friend mentioned that that was whom she had wanted me to meet. I couldn’t help but smile, he was good looking and dark haired and obviously was not afraid to have some fun (and believe it or not, he really can sing…just not Adele songs).

We were officially dating a month later and even though we lived about an hour away from each other, we saw each other almost every night. The best thing about a good relationship is that you don’t have to be afraid to be yourself. I know everyone says that, but it really is true. You accept each other for all your quirks and differences, but we also realize how much we have in common. I am the impulsive, impatient one in the relationship, he is the one that will take a moment to step back and look at the bigger picture. He is the creative idea maker; while I am the organized, let’s just make a schedule type of person. We both hate shopping, don’t like to talk during movies, love capers in almost every dinner we make, and both tend to fold our toast in half before eating it.

By June of the next year we were getting ready to head out on our first vacation together to Triangle X Ranch in Moose, WY. We were late to our plane, but no worries, they wanted to switch it around anyway so we only had to change flights once instead of twice to get there. And because of the “inconvenience to our unexpected flight change” they would not be charging us for our bags. How often does that ever happen at an airport??

The dude ranch was amazing. We got our own cabin – no locks on any of the doors – and our view was of the Teton Mountain Range. After an amazing breakfast (I have never eaten so much in my life – after every meal I swore I would never eat again, but when that dinner bell rang, I was so excited to stuff my face once more), we headed out to the corral to meet our horse for the week. I joked that I was going to get the horse with the most badass name and he argued that no, he was definitely going to get the badass horse. When the wrangler came out of the arena with a palomino mare and called out my name and introduced me to my horse Thunder, I was very pleased. I was even more pleased when a cute roan mare named Peppermint was assigned to Michael. It became the standing joke of the trip.

                                                A wrangler riding at sunset

The horseback riding was amazing, and even though Michael had only taken two horseback riding lessons with me in his entire life, he was galloping along with us by the end of the week. We traversed through herds of antelope and elk, climbed up mountain ranges, and galloped along wide open scrub plains with the Tetons towering overhead while bald eagle soared alongside. If that sounds epic, it’s because it was. Michael, being a photographer, was in heaven. One day while we were sitting on our porch having some wine, I pointed out to the black blur running across the camp and called out to the ranch’s black lab. When the black blur didn’t stop running, I took a closer look and realized that it was actually a black bear cub – just running through camp in the middle of the day.

                                The horses being herded out to pasture for the night

It was wild out there – no cell phones or TV, just you and nature. I think it was about our third or fourth day on the trip (we honestly can’t remember) when one of the wranglers told us about a good hiking trail that overlooked the valley. That evening we set out with his camera and a few beers, and something else that I did not know about. Hiking up the trail was amazing, both in the fact that we realized we were way out of shape and because of the view of the entire Snake River Valley it offered us. At the top of the hill, we found a good rock and stared out at the mountain range and the river and horses cradled in the valley way below us. Michael set up his camera and positioned it to get some good shots. He was being very particular about where I stood, but I let it go, because when you date a photographer sometimes that is just how it is. It was only when he came up to me and got down on one knee that I realized there was a reason he was being so odd. There is nothing more unexpected, more heart stopping, more tears of joy inducing thing than that moment. He said he had a whole speech planned out, but I think all he stammered out was “I love you, will you marry me?” I don’t even think I actually said yes, but we both understood each other. On our way back to our cabin, a group of other vacationers stopped us and we told them the news – which spurred an impromptu celebration in the main cabin. It was unbelievably touching that a group of relative strangers would take the time to celebrate with us. On a vacation like that, without TV or phones or anything to distract you, you realize how fun it is just to sit and talk with new people. Our last night on the trip, we walked down to the end of the road and sat on the fence and just talked, the two of us, as the bison grazed closer and the sun set behind the mountain peak.

 What I was doing while he was taking test pictures with the camera...little did I know...

                                              Captured the moment perfectly

Every day I appreciate him more and more. And now he is giving up his family in Ohio to come live with me in Chicago. It is so humbling to know that he is willing to do all this, just for me. That is true love, the willingness to sacrifice something to make the other person happy. After meeting him, I do believe in all that corny stuff like fate and ‘the one.’ I mean, I never meant to stay in Ohio for as long as I did. What if I had moved to Chicago earlier like I had planned? He also had moved around a lot – he went to school in Pittsburg, followed by a job in Baltimore, moving to LA, then Albuquerque, before finally moving back to Ohio. The bar I met him at was an hour away from my house and I would have never gone to on my own. The friend that introduced us was a friend that I had met when we had both gone on a college trip to Chile. What are the odds of all of that coming together somehow that we could meet? Now I am getting ready to move and leave him behind in our apartment. We are selling most of our furniture, so he will be in this apartment as the tables, chairs, bed, and couch all slowly start to sell off. I am sure this is going to be a rough month, but at the end of it, I will be driving back so we can move together. And our wedding, it is going to be in June. We are calling June our anniversary month because we can’t remember the exact dates of our first date or the proposal, but we know at least that they were in June. It is time again to face a little bit of the unknown and meet some changes, but even though it is terrifying, it is also kind of exciting and fun.