Marita and Sam met formally for the first time. Serendipitously.
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We were both walking with our respective friends in the woods, and we came across each other at "the Rock" overlooking the river at Blithewood. Sam thought Marita was really cute and cool. That night, he was trying to remember her name, and fell asleep with "Margarita... Margarita..." running through his head.

In hindsight we were both very cute that day.

Marita remembers they were all walking along the rocks by the river listening to the Beatles and Sam went to walk out on what looked like hard-packed mud. But it wasn't- it was river water and Sam was grinning like a little kid.

Over the next two years, Marita and Sam became good friends.
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We stayed up late together, doing homework, developing photos, playing games, watching YouTube, going on late night hikes, heading to Kingston to eat at 24 hour diners etc.

Two night owls procrastinating together.

Marita and Sam were next door neighbors at Bard.

We knocked on our shared wall when we wanted to hang out. We got meals and hiked together many times a week. When one of r mutual neighbors was being annoying, we went to each other to grumble.

Marita came to visit Los Angeles during winter break.

We went to Malibu - Leo Carillo has bluffs that look out over the water. We sat together and watched the sun as it sets on the ocean.

We went camping with friends in Joshua Tree. We bought a cheap tent, and in the course of the one night of camping, the zipper broke and the wind blew around in our tent all night long. It was completely trashed and broken by morning. We were so cold and uncomfortable we barely slept.

Looking back - what a magical week.

We started dating after we got back to Bard.

Marita and Sam took a road trip across the country together.

‍We woke up for sunrise at Zion National Park, but the road closed due to landslides and we spent ten hours driving through Utah dirt roads.

We slept in our car in the parking lot of the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid. In the morning, we got one of the only good meals of the trip at Brother Juniper's.

In DC, we got in very late. Everything is closed so we played Pokemon Go on the National Mall instead.

In the Smoky Mountains, we got more bugbites than at any other time of our life. Sam's arm is so completely covered it looked like a topographical map.
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We made it to Emerald Isle, where Sam got to meet "everyone" in the Dancy family. It turned out that Sam had been saying Marita's name wrong the whole time he'd known her, and she had never corrected him.

Marita graduated! And we became long distance for a while.

We camped together in West Virginia. Now we are experts at making beans over the fire. We made friends with a stick bug and took the best bath ever at the nearby hot springs.

As most people that have been in a long distance relationship will tell you, it's no fun. We talked a lot, and didn't see each other much. When we were able to find a way to see each other though, it was a highlight of that year.

When Sam was going back to school, he took an extended layover in Salt Lake City, and Marita drove down from Montana where she was working. We spent a couple days together. It was like coming inside from too long the cold.

We still remember just about every moment of that trip - could probably tell you linearly everything that happened from the moment Marita picked Sam up at the airport to the moment she dropped him off. That time was really precious. From cold hikes "too early" in the morning to getting coffee in a strip mall next to a Target to then walking into that Target to get socks to just driving down a long straight road together listening to the car's engine because we were half convinced that there was something wrong with Marita's car. We had really amazing molé and Marita finally tried horchata. Then we said goodbye, Marita dropped Sam off, and it was back to our separate lives bridged with long phone calls and constant texting.

Marita moved to Los Angeles, requiring another epic road trip.

This time with their guinea pigs Denty & Stu. A night in Missouri competes with Smoky Mountains for most bugs in the tent. We are camping near a prison, and can see big lights aimed all around the exterior wall. We wake up to a fresh abandoned tent, hack marks on the tree next to us, and a forest ranger who tells us a whole bunch about all the people he's heard of going missing in the area.

We drive down almost infinite half defined backroads in Utah to end up in a spot we hope is a camp site, set up our tent, and go to sleep. We wake up in in a field full of cows who are investigating our tent.

Sam graduated! and made his way back to Los Angeles.

After being long distance we weren't sure our relationship was as strong as it once was.

We stopped dating for a bit, but we missed each other. We started to see each other more, had some serious conversations, and then started dating again. Sam always argues that this is the beginning of the relationship we're in now, that it's the start of a stronger, more responsible relationship than what we had before. We fell back into a familiar rhythm of hiking, talking to each other a lot, and playing games together.

We went to Death Valley. The camping site we ended up staying at was full of a group of nomads that tried to meet up on that day every year. Another person staying there was a photographer who had sold most of his stuff and gone to the desert to be alone and take pictures.
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The pandemic hit.

‍Marita took home the chicks from her preschool classroom and we raised them in our apartment. Eventually, we had to find them a new home. The straw that broke the camels back was when one of them flew onto the stove while Marita was trying to cook.

We started making homemade pasta. Now we make it all the time and will talk, or listen to an audio book as we work as a team.

Marita and Sam adopted their dog - Mister Argo!!!

We are so lucky to have him in our life. He took immediately to hanging out with the guinea pigs and loves going camping and hiking with us.

We often talk about how much we love Mister and send each other a constant stream of pictures of Argo sleeping and cuddling.

Sometimes we'll just start crying when we think about how lucky we are to know him.

We call him Mister or Argo or "the dog" when we don't want him to know we're talking about him, but basically never Mister Argo.

We lost our dear little friends Denty & Stu.

We both feel lucky to have gotten to know them.

Stu was quiet and introverted. He's the brown one on the left. He was someone that approached everything in life on his own terms. We tried to make sure that he got the privacy he desired, and mostly watched him from afar. But we loved him, and would do everything we could to make him happy. He took enormous pleasure in cilantro, or spending time a good place to watch from.
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Denty was fearless.  He liked running all over the apartment. When you opened the fridge you would look down to see him perching on your foot asking for veggies or head scritches. He was a bit of a bully honestly, pushing Stu around and stealing Argo's bed. He could take on any one of us and always made his prescence known... biting the back of your heel if he didn't like what you were doing. He made us laugh and we miss him dearly.

We travelled to Montreal together.

In January we visited the beach where we had gone together 7 years earlier. It was cold and windy and beautiful. We huddled together under a blanket and reflected on all we had done together... hey why don't we like... get married? Neither of us had gone to propose, but we decided to together.

We started reading books together. We go to the gym together. We draw together, knit together. We moved. We're getting married!!!

Honestly a lot of this year has been taken up by working, moving, and planning for our wedding. We've been busy, and have had a lot less time for anything outside the essential. Spending a lot of time together and trying to build a life together has its own appeal though.

We really enjoy each other's company, and it's nice to work on something together.