“A Love Worth Waiting For”

It was a Sunday evening before Memorial Day; Ron had invited his best friend Aaron and his girlfriend Heather over for backyard beers and a fire. As the evening progressed, Aaron and Heather decided to play matchmaker. Heather and several of her friends and coworkers would regularly meet up at Boots in Brackenridge for Tuesday night karaoke, and Aaron had been dragged along to the last gathering about three weeks prior, where he'd met Heather's good friend Christina. So both Heather and Aaron started trying to set Ron & Christina up to meet each other, while piquing our interest with details about one another: Christina was a good singer, and a redhead! Ron was a good guy who had his stuff together, plus he was cute! Pictures were shared and plans made to meet up with the karaoke crew on Tuesday.

The morning after the match-up, Ron set out to complete his yearly Memorial Day Weekend tradition - edging and mulching the yard. But this year, something caught his eye; while he was edging around the willow trees that he and his son (and now groomsman!) Ezra had planted several years earlier, he spotted, among the blades of grass, weeds, and ground vine of an imperfect lawn, a four-leaf clover. It was the first he'd ever found in his nearly 45 years on the planet. Ron had never been the superstitious type, but he decided "why not?" and took it as a sign of good things to come. He gently picked the clover and pressed it in a book to save it.

Tuesday came, and the plans with the karaoke crew fell through. The next time Heather would get together with her friends for karaoke would be at least three weeks away! Ron couldn't accept waiting that long. Why hold on to some lame wish that he and Christina might have a chance to meet "someday" ... frittering away the summer, missing all the date-worthy opportunities that warm weather and late evenings could offer? So Ron texted Heather to ask Christina if he could have her number. It wasn't till the next day, June 1, 2018, that he had his answer. He didn't wait much longer; that evening, he started off the conversation with a polite text, which became a long, energetic exchange. The texting continued daily, until they finally managed to find time between multiple jobs and kids to meet for a date! The evening of June 6, Ron picked up Christina at her house, and they were off to the Three Rivers Arts Festival. They had a blast, just being together, and being themselves. Now you might be tempted to believe it was love at first sight, but you'd be wrong. It had already been love at first text!

Ron knew he was a lucky man, and had told Christina so, many times. She was his lucky clover that had taken him more than four decades to find. While he didn't want to rush things, he knew early on that he wanted to ask Christina to marry him. Of course, his timing was impeccable. They'd met in 2018, dated all through 2019, and it was now early 2020. Ron had already been mulling over how he wanted to propose. While both he and Christina were romantics, neither was fond of attention or grandiose gestures of affection ... so he was off the hook for coming up with a flash mob or some other over-the-top, Instagrammable proposal with glitter and rose-petal confetti photographed from 42 different angles; this kind of thing would put both of them in a spotlight that neither wanted, and thus would be a horrible way to start an engagement. Instead, Ron tried to plan something small and sweet - downtown at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, under the pretense of going out on a double-date with Aaron and Heather. At the Point fountain, with Aaron ready to snap a few pictures, Ron would get down on one knee, where Ron & Christina had sat on its edge watching the sun set on their first date. This would have been nice, but by March, the country had shut down in its first attempt to "flatten the curve." Ron held out hope when public health officials began to recommend guidelines for opening back up, but the Three Rivers Arts Festival had already made the decision to go 100% virtual; his plans for proposing had been decimated by a foe invisible to the naked eye.

By the time summer rolled around, some in the family were getting a little impatient. Ron & Christina had already talked about marriage - and since they'd already gone to some jewelers to get an idea of the kind of ring Christina would like, the heat was on. But things were looking promising; in July, Ron & Christina would be going on a week's vacation to East Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains, staying at a private cabin in the foothills, and so this time together would afford many romantic opportunities to pop the question. The family's waiting would finally be finished! Ron had thought about this, but it was too obvious; he did want the proposal to be a surprise. Besides that, proposing to Christina in Tennessee wouldn't fulfill one of the main anchors Ron wanted as part of the proposal: he wanted it to happen somewhere that was already significant, a place that had a history and a meaning in their relationship. For his job, Ron worked from home, and often, Christina would stay over at his place on her days off work, which rotated weekly. It was a Friday late in June, the 26th, and Ron was on lunchbreak. He told Christina there was something in the backyard that he wanted her to see. Perplexed, she took his hand and they went out, walked off the back porch and into the backyard, to one of the Willow trees Ron & Ezra had planted several years earlier. Ron explained that this, right at the base of the tree, was where he'd found the four leaf clover right before they met. Now that she was there with him, he had two of the luckiest finds in his life in the same place. He got down on one knee, pulled out the ring, and asked Christina to marry him. (You all know what the answer was, of course. But it was good that no one else was there to take pictures, because they were both dressed in the standard relaxed outfit of a summer day - shorts and t-shirts. They followed up with a more presentable picture the next day to announce their engagement.)