Happy Anniversary: Looking Back to the Beginning

Today Paul and I have been married 28 years.

I have been thinking a lot about our life together, and when we first started dating.

I found an old journal that I wrote in when Paul and I first started dating.

We started dating in the summer of 1982.  I had just finished my first year at the University of Idaho, and he was attending Western Montana College in Dillon, Montana. 

I remember being surprised when someone said he was interested in me.  Mainly because he was four years a head of me in school.  When I was a freshman at Kellogg Junior High School, he was a senior at Kellogg High School and was the quarterback on the football team, and one of the starting basketball players, and a really good runner on the track team.  So I wondered why would someone like him be interested in me?

But he was interested.  And by the end of the summer, we had decided we wanted to get to know one another better, and would write letters while we were each at our different colleges.

The first letter I received from him had a poem in it he wrote to me.  Here is what it said:

To be read slowly and quietly, aloud.

Wind and Water

To be touched by the fresh night breezes,
To be cooled by the evening light rain,
To smile when the wind kicks the drops in my face
To laugh when it does it again.

Wind and water
Pure and free
Changing my old to new
yet...
these are mere whispers of the true things in life,
My God's Holy Spirit
And You.

So, this is how our letter writing began.  The day I received this letter, I had written him a letter on a six foot piece of butcher paper.  This is what I wrote in my journal on August 28, 1982.

Hello!
Today was a very exciting day in the life of Carol Woolum.  Ever since I have been here at school, I have wanted to send Paul a letter, so God put an idea of writing him a letter on butcher paper.  So this morning I bought a big piece of butcher paper (about 2 yards long) and wrote Paul a letter on it and drew pictures and wrote little poems and verses on the border.  It was so fun.  Well while I was starting it, I went to see if I got a letter and there was one and it was from Paul.  It was such a neat letter.  He said that he didn't know what to write in the letter, and that he liked to talk to me in person a lot better, "especially when my arms are around you".  Boy, that was neat! Then he sent this poem.

I wrote a poem to him about our last night together walking around Kellogg before I headed back to U of I.  Here is what I wrote:

The Simple Things

The simple things in life always seem
 to give me the most pleasure,
things like waiting for semis
to rush under a highway bridge,
throwing rocks in a river,
sitting in a deserted mining car, or just
walking hand in hand.

All these simple things are even more
pleasurable when they are shared
with someone,
Shared with someone like you.

I am so glad I kept a journal and wrote thoughts about when we first met, and first started dating, because you don't always remember all those special little details.

Such as the date of our first kiss.  It was August 8, 1982.  Eight years later to the day, our first child Molly was born.

It is fun to read back about my feelings for Paul, and how we were friends, then I really like him, and then I started falling in love with him.  I was in love by Christmas, and told him so in a letter when I gave him his Christmas present that year.  And he was in love, too.

Even after 28 years of marriage, I am still in awe that he chose me. 

I still feel like that girl back at the University of Idaho who gushed about her new boyfriend, and how wonderful he was, and how crazy she was about him.

We were head over heels, gah-gah over one another back when we first started dating....

and we are head over heels, gah-gah over one another today.

And from the things we hear people say, people can tell!!