In the first, they met as volunteers living in tents at an Emergency Communities relief center in post Hurricane Katrina Buras, Louisiana. Crysty’s laugh, “a clean and beautiful truth”, immediately captured Luke's attention, and evoked a favored passage of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Over the course of long days of service work, nights conversing around campfires, a community gathering complete with a New Orleans brass band, they fell in love. But after this brief moment in time their lives split and went in different directions. In the second, after 8 years of silence, Crysty reached out to Luke by email from India and all the old conversations resumed. Three months later Luke was boarding a plane, and they reunited at 2 am in the Ahmedabad airport. The rest is history. They live beside a big river again, the Hudson this time, in Catskill, NY with their Border Collie/Australian Shepherd mix - Interstitial or "Stitch" for short - in a place where the forsythia blooms every spring, just like Crysty’s favorite poem Gray Room, by Wallace Stevens.

Luke proposed with a letter: "Seven years ago, you wrote an email that changed my life, and now I am writing a letter to change yours." He proposed with a 'promise string' and two emeralds he purchased while they were traveling through Ladakh and had been carrying around ever since. The stone that became Crysty's ring traveled with them through India, was rescued from a wildfire near their first home in Los Angeles, moved to their next home in Houston, and was ultimately shared over their dining room table in Catskill.