Monday, April 25, 2005

At the very beginning of our senior year of high school, Amanda, Jimmie, and I were walking down the hall and carrying on a conversation. This was before Amanda became The Peach People, before I became Bovine Woman (hey! there's a story you'll not be hearing!), before almost everything. We were walking towards class and chatting, and then suddenly I was walking alone and chatting because Jimmie had pulled Amanda between the lockers, in a very teen movie sort of way, to ask her out. I knew what had to be happening--the whole school knew it was coming--and so I continued to class. When Amanda arrived she was as fluttery as I've ever seen her, and it was that day that I started talking about their wedding.

Many of you have heard this story before, and in a month I'll be on my way back to Florida for that wedding. It has been a whole lot of years in the making, but I don't think anyone has ever expected that things would turn out otherwise.

Not too long after they got together, Jimmie wrote Amanda some sort of missive spelling out his feelings for her. She sent it in an email to me--there are some things no girl can keep secret, especially not at eighteen--and I have kept it all of these years. I've found myself the keeper of these sorts of things often, and I still have several such declarations that have outlasted the relationships they were made in. I doubt that Amanda even remembers sending it to me, but I'll keep it. I won't bring it out for the wedding, because if I tried she'd fly all the way to Seattle just to kick me in the head, but I'll hold onto it because I have this poem in my head for the future. And in this scene I see myself visiting their kids, good old Aunt Samantha, and sharing it with them in secret. Just so that there's always proof of how much these two have always loved each other.

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