Sometimes I forget that we've shared three apartments.

The first one was in Roanoke, where I found anxiety and started graduate school. I felt like such an adult, grinding my coffee beans fresh every morning and parking in my garage. Rob lived there over the summer, and then Christmas break, and then moved in for another summer after his graduation from Hampden-Sydney, but it felt less like our apartment than it felt like it was mine, even if it didn't fit.

The second one was in Charlottesville, with weird green carpet and a tiny kitchen, but a little office/guest room that made us feel like we had a home. We spent hours in libraries and computer labs, at bars with cheap drinks and cornhole set up under a string of outdoor lights, and were constantly with friends. I felt like less of an adult, with a part-time job as a barista and afternoons full of research, and I loved it.

Now we're in Minneapolis, in the high-rise apartment with a balcony and a pool we never use. It's big enough and everything is new and we finally have that bookcase from IKEA that I've always wanted. This is the apartment we have as an engaged couple, and it's the first place we'll live as newlyweds. What other defining moments (other than that impending Minnesota winter) will occur while we live under this roof, I don't know yet. But I'll look back one day and see it from the future, and I'll tell you what this place was like and what it means to us because of that.

After a year apart, I forgot that living together is something Rob and I have done before--the norm, really. We've left little parts of ourselves places and picked up and taken things with us, and now we're here, together (again).

My sweet friend Emily got married this weekend in Richmond, and I felt overwhelmed with gratitude that she invited me and Rob to be there to see it. Emily and I were both English majors at Longwood, and didn't really get to know one another until after I graduated and she was a senior. We had already been Facebook friends, but really only connected later through blogging. We started meeting for coffee whenever I was in town, and we'd talk and laugh and get teary-eyed as the hours passed and our lattes got cold and we got really serious about life and marriage and God and Harry Potter and politics.

And then one morning, I was in Farmville for the weekend, getting up early to see her present her senior seminar paper on The Bell Jar, and as she spoke with passion and excitement and answered questions about her topic in front of the room, I realized that she and I were actually real friends, and again I felt overwhelmed. How sweet it is to find yourself in such a random, special friendship.

I started this weekend early, on Friday morning, and I drove to Longwood to visit my brother and talk to a handful of my favorite professors from undergrad. I didn't realize it until I was driving away from campus just how perfect it was for me to stop by Longwood on my way to Richmond to see Emily. Farmville, Virginia is where so many good things begin--my education, my relationship with Rob, my friendship with Emily, and her relationship with her now husband, Robbie (another Economics-studying Robert, just by the way).

Emily and Robbie got married on Saturday and I don't know if I've ever seen any two people happier.

How sweet it is to see true love like that.

I dropped my Rob off at the airport on Sunday afternoon and drove home through the rain. It was warm and grey outside, and when the rain stopped the sun came out, and I rolled down the windows of my car. I've been having a really rough time lately. I've been sad and overwhelmed and negative a lot of the time. But seeing Emily this weekend reminded me that I can be positively intentional about a lot of my life. So as I drove, in the middle of my musings about spring; and my fond memories of college; and the thought of our bright, prosperous futures with the people we love the most; I took a deep breath from the cool, wet air outside and smiled.

How sweet it is.

[2010]

From that first Halloween party where we met to the years we spent together in college; through that first stint of "distance" after I graduated and you were a senior at Hampden-Sydney; then the warehouse apartment we shared in downtown Roanoke with the brick walls and the lacquered cement floors; to Charlottesville, and the apartment with the green carpet and tiny little kitchen and noisy upstairs neighbors.

And then you went to China and I moved back to the lake, where you returned after your trip. That summer together before we started our careers; and then to Northern Virginia. And now Minnesota has become part of the story, with plans for flights and twice-a-month visits tucked in between lonely weekends apart. I have fallen in love with you even more, and in different ways through each new season of the past four years.

We have come so far together, and there is no one I'd rather be sharing my life with today.

Happy Anniversary, Rob. You mean the world to me.