We are moving full steam ahead with the wedding. The ceremony will be outdoors with plenty of room for everyone. Inside the reception area, there is space to distance if necessry and still be in line with the current 50% capacity guidelines in NH. Current rules: guests must wear masks through the buffet line and on the dance floor, but we’re hopeful that even that won’t be necessary by 10.24. As for accommodations, we ask that if you’re staying on site, you book your cabin and let us know who, if anyone, you’d be comfortable bunking with!
It was a typical weekend event. My dad’s friend, Shane, would open the Holderness gym for impromptu skills and drills. Sometimes dad would host in Campton and we’d go back and forth, with the pretty standard group of girls that wanted to show up. It wasn’t, however, strictly open to the girls, so one Sunday Gabe Horton strolled in donning his favorite Celtics headband and jersey. Now, by the time we got to high school, I didn’t recall who this little baller was, but once we started dating, the memory flooded back. He rolls his eyes in faux embarrassment over the sweatband every time I mention it. We may have only been together since the end of senior year, but we’ve run in similar circles since we were about 10.
Through high school, we saw each other on and off, mostly through mutual friends, but we never really got to be friends ourselves until senior year. For those of you that know Gabe well, you can expect him to be randomly singing at any given moment. More often than not it's when he's waiting for something, engaged in a project, or otherwise passing the time. We had physics together at the end of the day senior year, and on one fateful day second semester, while waiting for the bell, Gabe started singing. He was singing Josh Turner's Why Don't We Just Dance, and for some reason it caught my attention. I knew the song but couldn't recall who sang it, so I asked. He said who he thought it was, the bell rang and we parted ways. I got to my car and booted up my ipod nano. I found the song, and he was right. Later, I realized I had his number in my phone from inviting him to a party a couple years before. I texted him and told him it was, in fact, Josh Turner. And with that message we started to become friends.
At the end of senior year, we started to spend more time together. We realized that we were really comfortable around one another and wanted something more. We had our first date watching Disney movies, one of my favorite pastimes. After watching Up, we headed to the CES playground to swing. I've been teased by my friends for this seemingly juvenile evening, but in all honesty it made it clear Gabe and I were on the same wavelength, we weren't too cool to enjoy the little things, and we weren't pretending to be people we weren't. It may not sound like a big deal, but to me, to be able to be 100% myself with someone at 18 years old, was everything. Right before graduation in 2010, Gabe asked me to be his girlfriend, and we've been together ever since.
Despite going to different colleges, we stayed together, wrote letters to each other, and made an effort to visit on the weekends. When Gabe transferred to UNH, seeing each other was so much easier. We learned more about each other and decided we wanted to experience all of life's adventures together. From school in the Northeast to moving to California to saying I Do this fall, we're all in to keep the adventures rolling.