Every morning, I bring Erika a cup of coffee. Sometimes, when I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll get us both iced coffees and surprise her. One day, when I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, I brought her a ring with her coffee. I asked her to marry me. She said yes. It was a really memorable morning. Now I get to bring her coffee every morning for the rest of our lives.

The short version: we met through friends. The slightly longer version: we met through friends we no longer have. The “elevator pitch” version: Two souls searching for love find it on the banks of the Penobscot River. The spare-me-no-detail version of our story: Okay, here it goes!

We met in Brewer, Maine in the fall of 2016. For the Michiganders reading this, think of Maine as like the mitten part of your state, tilting hard north-east along the ocean, with a thousand little peninsulas jutting south instead of a thumb. Brewer is pretty high up in Maine — say 2 hours north of Portland, depending on how you drive — but not really that high up, because there’s about 4 more hours of due north driving to get to Madawaska at the upper tip. Brewer is small. It’s across the Penobscot River from Bangor, which is pronounced bang-gore, and repeated elsewhere as banger. I don’t know why. I was living in Brewer, commuting to the University of Maine, which is up the river. Erika was living in Bangor, working as a barber. Our meeting wasn’t the stuff of Hallmark cards: Erika ascended the not-to-code staircase of my rental apartment and met an unshowered version of Pete in his kitchen. But there you have it. I think she was disc-golfing with a few friends, one of whom knew me, and knew that I am always happy to meet new people. We were friends, but not romantic for the first year we knew each other. We were seeing other people, but we did come to respect each other, and eventually, we figured out that we were supposed to be together. Then we set about making that happen. It wasn’t easy logistically. Neither of us were from Maine. Erika’s home town of East Lansing, Michigan is more than 900 miles from Bangor. Peter’s home town of Acton, Massachusetts, it turned out, was also far away from Michigan. I ordered a 2’x3’ map on Amazon, and when it came we set it on the floor and figured out that the Hudson river valley looked like somewhere in the middle-ish of Massachusetts and Michigan. We put our belongings in a storage locker after I finished up with the University, and Erika said good bye to one of the most bereft clienteles in the history of Bangor. Then, we hit the road to find a place to live that would work for both of us.

We decided to live in Glens Falls after having dinner there one night on our road trip. It was the end of a long stretch of travelling and camping and seeing places along the Hudson River. West Point, Fishkill, New Palz, Kingston, Saratoga, Schuylerville, and so on. If you have ever had dinner in a vacation town one night and thought, “We could live here,” that’s basically what we did. I wanted mountains, and we were right in the foothills of the Adirondacks. She wanted lakes, and there were some lower-g great lakes around. It all penciled out. Glens Falls was great in so many ways, but it just so happened that Glens Falls was still very far from Michigan. We had the 2’x3’ map from Amazon, so we knew that it was not exactly close, but the reality of how far wasn’t something we fully understood. Lots of hard talks and “what are we doing” type conversations, which are always a joy. I remember having dinner with another couple — she was from Glens Falls, he was from South Glens Falls, and it was like: no way! How simple would that have been for us? The Massachusetts/Michigan connection isn’t an accidental thing. It’s completely absurd, like the Brooks & Dunn’s song, “Only in America,” where a bus driver looks back in wonder at what the kids in the seats will become. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. And with that kind of good energy from unknown possibility, we said, you know what, let’s move to Michigan.

We landed in Holt, Michigan, which is just south of South Lansing. Been here almost a year and we have a dog named Brewer. You get it, but everyone out here thinks we’re from Milwaukee. Her family is close, some in Holt, some in Lansing, others scattered around Michigan in sweet places. My family and pretty much everyone I know is in the northeast. This is a big part of why we’re having the wedding here. Michigan is great, and we want you to come see it. If you have made it this far through the story, you should have no trouble making it to Albion, Michigan, where this wedding is going down. It’s on a farm. It’s quaint. It’s flat, so the sunset is going to be unreal. This chapter is ongoing. There’s going to be a party. We want you to come.