Next month is our 48th wedding anniversary, but today is the 50th anniversary of living together. I announced our intention to my mother via a letter sent from Kansas where I was traveling with my step-grandmother. (It was cowardly. While I was old enough to move in with Gary, I was too young to tell Mom face to face.) I learned a lot about wool on that trip.

Genevieve, my grandfather’s third wife (my grandmother divorced him, his second wife died), was a weaver and gave my mother a loom that I used as a child. In college, though I was completing studio degrees in ceramic (BFA in Ceramic Art, hand building) and goldsmithing (another BFA in Metal Design, mostly enameling), I took every weaving class I could find. There were not many.

I juried in to the first University Street Fair with ceramics, and later the Bellevue Arts Fair. I thought I might live in the country some day. I thought I might garden, raise dairy goats. I was young and idealistic and had many thoughts.

In 1972 on Independence Day, Gary and I moved into a small one-bedroom with high ceilings, #2 in “Big Pink,” a notorious apartment house in the University District of Seattle. We walked everywhere or took the bus, had no car, and pinched pennies. A night out was two-for-one enchiladas at Casa Lupita or the $1 movie, not both and only once a month. We were both working at the University Book Store, both about to be juniors at the University of Washington. Our parents were not happy. We were.

I painted out the deep cerulean walls the living room with light taupe but chose to leave the satin black trim. The black ceiling would also remain in the bedroom because it was ten feet up and I didn’t have a ladder. And I was tired. It was very hot that first night, we had only a single mattress, and the tall double hung windows facing north had all been painted shut. We would eventually get them all open, but only succeeded in prying open one that first night. We slept head to foot.

We lived there until Gary completed his degree and I began my third. Then we bought a sweet house near the zoo. We bought a car. We raised puppies and talked about children. Maybe. Maybe not. We lived near the zoo. Gary worked there. I was teaching in Bellevue at an elite girls prep school.

When I inherited my family’s beach house, Gary and I decided to have children. We had been allowed as children to walk and ride our bikes everywhere. We brought home filthy clothing and tadpoles. We walked to school and to the local suburban mall and through forest where there were the massive stumps of first growth trees high over our heads and seven feet across. We watched the night sky, playing until full dark or hunger drove us home. That was not possible in the city where even the stars are lost in a rusty sky. [A visiting friend from Seattle said, “It’s so dark.” It was night and he’d forgotten what night could be.]

Years later, I am sure we made the right choices, though not everyone agrees. My mother called moving home to Oregon “stupid reason” to have children. My older son calls his childhood “feral.” But allowing our children freedom to wander, to play on the beach, and to hike in forest—this was essential, the magic of our beginning.

During that long drive across country in 1972 with Genevieve, I heard a whip-or-will and saw fireflies for the first time. We drove across the plains and watched a storm coming. No mountain range in view. I learned to spin wool and use vegetable dyes in Kansas, discussed livestock with a farmer in Missouri, nearly died in the Badlands on the way home, and missed Gary like fury.

And then Gary and I made a family.

Happy anniversary, sweetheart!