Last year — April 2024 — I received a Happy Birthday email from my high school sweetheart, whom I had not talked to in forty-seven years. She sent it through my website, and the form required that she put her phone number in before she could send it.
Naturally, I called. She immediately hung up on me. "I can't talk now, I have to go!" and hung up. I waited about an hour, called again, and this time we talked for a while.
We met in high school geology class, sitting in the back. We flirted, and I am the reason she got a D in geology. We both loved rocks from a very early age. For me, I was always walking around our family cabin in Aitkin looking for agates.
We started dating in my senior year. She was attending the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. We kept dating after I enlisted in the Air Force. I finished basic, and she, her mother, and her aunt came to see me while I was at Chanute AFB for tech school. We spent the weekend in Chicago seeing the local sites — and it happened that the Air Force Thunderbirds were performing over Lake Michigan that weekend.
After tech school, I was assigned to Minot AFB, North Dakota, where we continued our long-distance relationship. That was, until I got stupid and broke up with her.
Forty-seven years of no communication. And now we were talking again.
I flew her to Albuquerque to meet and see if there was anything still there. On November 1st, we were married in Chariton, Iowa. We will be moving to Chariton in January 2026 to start our new life in our new building — our home upstairs, art studios on the main floor, and wood and other storage in the drive-in basement.
Things come full circle.
Don