"We're getting married!"

When Sam and I were in school together he made me a ring of plain copper wire. He jokingly placed it on my finger during band one day. I was tickled to receive something he had made just for me, and kept it safely nestled in a keepsake box until we reconnected in 2018. The reason my engagement ring is rose gold is to commemorate the first ring Sam ever gave me, a plain ring of wound copper that was worth more to me than gold. So look around on our wedding day and see how many copper/rose gold details you can find woven through our special day.

We met in band class at Northside, we played French Horn next to each other. Danielle would always ask extra questions or need to borrow a pencil and make sure she sat next to me on field trips. While I hoped that she might like me, I was completely unaware that she did. One of the band field trips took us to FSU to see a college marching band and I spotted part of a shiny brass lyre in the parking lot, a piece of hardware that attaches to the instrument to hold sheet music. Danielle had never seen one before (French Horns aren't known for being marching instruments); I explained what it was before giving it to her. On our first anniversary Danielle gave me a shadow box with the lyre she had kept all those years.

Our first date almost never happened. Sam invited me to join him for coffee at Dakotas coffee shop one Saturday afternoon. I was afraid that we would meet again and it would turn out that we didn't know each other anymore... or that the date would go terribly wrong and we would wreck our long friendship... or any number of other worst case scenarios. I was so nervous I almost turned the car around three times. I sat in my car in the parking lot way longer than necessary to get my things together, and told myself I was going to stick to light topics, like nursing school, and the nice weather. No messy personal stories, or family drama, or blathering on about single parenting. Just the facts. 🤣 Well that went out the window the minute we sat down. I spilled every nitty gritty detail he had missed over the last decade and he laughed and invited me to lunch the next day because he was sure we couldn't have covered everything. So we met for lunch the next day, and almost every day for the next several months without missing a beat. And we knew that we had finally found where we belonged. Together, Always and Forever.