What Has Baytown To Do With Paris?

Our hometowns could hardly be more different: Jacob grew up in Baytown, Texas, which is just outside Houston, an hour inland from the Gulf of Mexico, near the Louisiana border; Emily grew up in Paris, France, which is, well, Paris. Jacob's backyard is one of the largest concentrations of oil refineries in the world; Emily's is the Luxembourg Garden, home to the French Senate; Jacob fondly remembers sticky hot summer mornings riding bikes with his brothers to the bowling alley, and stopping on the way back for a snow-cone or Big Gulp from the corner gas station; Emily remembers rollerblading with difficulty over cobblestones, sitting in smoky cafes on rainy mornings, and dipping buttered bread into hot chocolate.

How do these two people, how did we, with such dissimilar geographical upbringings, meet and fall in love? Put simply, we went to the same college. But we also credit the stories of King David and Esther, and the words of Jesus, which we both heard as children, and still tell to each other today. We both credit feeling free as children--to be interested in reading (we just this minute found out that we both loved Nancy Drew!) and drawing, or whatever we liked--which would lead us to writing and photography. We can credit a post-college book club, jokingly and accurately referred to as a dating club. Emily's annoyance with rush-hour traffic on the Eisenhower, which led to more and longer dinners at Jacob's apartment. A shared urge to tell meaningful stories, through words and images, leading us travel to Athens, Greece, last summer to document the sex trafficking industry. Our love of cooking together.

Whatever other inscrutable factors in our joining together, we look forward to celebrating the mysteries and complexities of our previous, separate lives, and all the possibilities of our new life together.

p.s. For some internet fun, we present Wikipedia Challenge, a Seven-Degrees-to-Kevin-Bacon-type game where participants compete to find the shortest Wiki-link distance between two Wikipedia entries. Today's challenge: the entry entitled Oil Refinery to the entry for Luxembourg Garden, or Jardin du Luxembourg. Fewest clicks wins. I did it in four.

Eighty eight days...

The One Hundred Day countdown is officially on.

A string of little dated envelopes Jacob strung across my fireplace twelve days ago is down to eighty eight little white rectangles, each dangling impatiently from its paperclip. I never thought that as a 25 year old I'd be so obsessively counting down the days to something. The last time may have been my ninth birthday!

Needless to say, we can't wait to see all of you in July! In anticipation of your travels, we've added a few hotel suggestions for those of you who'd like to make your arrangements (see "Where to Stay?" in the far right column).

Oh boy, 45 minutes to go 'til the 87 day mark... I should get some sleep!

(Photo by David Wittig)

"How's Emily's Hand Like a Lemon Pie?"

"It's got meringue on it!"

On Saturday, January 13, I secretly canceled Emily's 8am breakfast appointment, and woke her at 7 (much to her confusion) to "tell her stories"--moments and memories from our time together, like camping with friends last May, watching her as she took photographs in Athens this summer, reading aloud from the novel You Shall Know Our Velocity! with her brother and sister at Thanksgiving. Emily says it was about halfway through the stories, as she began to notice their chronological progression through the months and seasons of our relationship, and as she became more fully awake, that she began to wonder exactly why I was there. Was it really just to tell her stories? But she quickly reprimanded herself for getting her hopes up, because she "knew" I didn't have a ring. But when she sat up on her bed and realized I was kneeling beside her, fumbling with something in my pocket...

Last year Jarissa, one of my first graders, six years old going on seventeen, beckoned me over with her little index finger to where she was standing on the third step outside St. Sylvester school.
--Mr. Anderson, do you want to get married someday?
--To you?
--No, to someone else.
--Well, probably.
--Okay, here's what you do (leans forward and lowers her voice): Make her laugh, make her smile, send her flowers, and... just do nice things with her. And then after a while, you buy her a beautiful ring, and...
--And then we're married?
--No, then you're engaged.

...then began a joyful day of announcements, by phone and in person, at the end of which Emily and I were too exhausted to do anything but sit on a couch and watch a movie--something we almost never do.

We will be married in Racine, Wisconsin, on Friday, July 20, 2007.