Six years and counting...

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

~Louis De Bernieres

In the last several years, life has handed us beautiful days and terribly sad moments that have torn us in two. Many of those moments have testified to the notion of something deeper; the one that comes to mind is a cold February night last year. That experience taught me many things, not the least being that I knew our love was not a fleeting thing. As the hours and minutes ticked by, uncertainty was my constant companion and the thought of losing him was more than I could bear. We know there is opposition in all things, so we've managed to hang on through the ups and downs... and even learn a few things in the process. As I think back on all of it, there's not another person I'd rather take this wild ride with than David Daniel Goodwin; he's made it a beautiful, fun-filled ride worth remembering.