Sometimes I like to think that my marriage was fated. Or, maybe I just read too many books, filling my mind with questions about destiny and free will. When I look back over the last 10 years, I can trace where I am now back to one memorable day.
My husband and I grew up in the same town for most of our young and adolescent lives but never knew each other. I'm two years older than him, we didn't attend the same elementary schools, and he went to the local public school while I went to Taft (where my parents teach and I grew up). Although we knew many of the same people, my husband and I never met--until the summer of 2003 when I had just graduated from college and took a job working at the Taft Summer School. He applied to work there as well, and we first saw each other during an opening meeting on the first day of summer school. As a returning summer school teacher, I gathered with friends I had made the summer before, glad that I wasn't part of the terrified throng of interns. I can still remember the unshakable sense of deja vu I felt that muggy June morning in the faculty room. Sure, the wood-paneled walls and recessed bookshelves of the faculty room were a familiar sight, and the odd aroma of coffee, old books, musty furniture, and freshly cut grass brought me back to previous summers of my youth, scrambling over the furniture and climbing the rickety spiral staircase to the balcony of that room. These sights, smells, and sounds were ingrained in my childhood. Something else seemed strangely familiar. I scanned the room, wondering if perhaps I had crossed paths with one of the teachers in high school or college. That wasn't it. The intern with the wild curly hair and the beaded hemp necklace stood out. We must have crossed paths a number of times before then, so this familiar feeling wasn't unfounded, but the first time we met (on that late June morning) forged the first link.We discovered that he was good friends with the younger brother of one of my best friends, and that his parents and my parents knew many of the same people as well. By the end of that first week, a summer romance had begun, and we were inseparable.
By the end of the summer, when he was headed back to college for his junior year and I was leaving for Boston to start a job, we decided to give the long-distance thing a try, and it worked.
After a year in Boston, I found a job teaching at Berkshire School (a boarding school in the Berkshires), and I remained there for 4 years while my husband finished his last year at UConn, got a MA in Teaching and looked for a job. As a faculty kid myself, I always loved boarding school life, and for years I thought I'd probably end up living and working at a boarding school for the rest of my life. But, my husband comes from a family of public school teachers, and the idea of living in a dorm with high school kids was less than appealing to him. He found a public high school teaching job in CT, and our yet another link in the chain was forged. Still together (but not yet married), we moved together to central CT, and I found a job at a lovely day school in West Hartford. :)
Now, my husband and I have been married for over 2 years, have a house, and are set on a path. Ten years ago, I never would have guessed that I'd be living in Avon, working at a day school, and married to someone from my home town, but fate had plans for me, and I can trace where I am today back to that one memorable encounter on a late June day.
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