I don’t have a single picture of our honeymoon. Why? I’m not sure, exactly. I owned a camera at the time, though it was pretty darn cheap. We were young, broke college kids. We’d been gifted a week of timeshare at a place in Lake Lure. In winter. I decided on a Christmas wedding, because after 2 1/2 years of dating we were, quite frankly, too anxious to wait until the following spring to get married (as we had originally planned), moving in together was definitely out of the question, and we knew we wouldn’t have any more money in May than we had that December, so why wait another 6 months? Besides a candlelit tour of the Biltmore at Christmastime, there wasn’t a lot of sightseeing on that honeymoon, therefore, hardly any scenery worthy of a photo. Sometimes I kick myself for not asking someone to take a picture of the two of us at dinner, or the place we stayed, or even the dang Biltmore House in all of its Christmas glory. 

As we approach our 24th wedding anniversary, I think of all those moments in our life that I failed to document. In 1993, we weren’t equipped with camera phones, always prepared to capture life’s most significant events. No one was there to snap a picture of Tim proposing to me in my dorm room, not that I would’ve wanted an audience, anyway. No elaborate, romantic, well-thought-out proposal. Just a 19-year-old kid, down on one knee, pretending to find something in my laundry bag, and trying to put the ring on my right hand instead of my left. Would I have wanted something more dramatic? Of course; I was a hopelessly romantic, 18-year-old girl. I did have my very own customized ring, though; Tim’s stepdad, who happened to be a jeweler, designed my ring using a sapphire from my mother-in-law’s first wedding ring and a couple of cubic zirconia stones (did I mention we were broke?).

There are other things from early in our relationship that I wish I’d documented in pictures:

-The cars Tim and I were driving when we were dating

-Tim (or both of us, actually) on his motorcycle

-The site of our first date 

-The dorm where Tim proposed to me

-Pictures from our time together at Clemson

-Our first apartment in Clemson

-The coffee table that Tim built using PVC pipe, and old mirror, and dark green spray paint

-The dryer we inherited that required a bungee cord wrapped around the door for it to work

-The couple of places I worked while Tim finished school (daycare, discount eyeglass place)

-The craptastic apartment we rented when we first moved to Nashville

We traveled back to our hometown recently for Thanksgiving. Tim and I grew up together, though we weren’t really friends until the months before we started dating. There’s a comfort that can’t be explained knowing that, with the exception of the first 3 years or so of our lives, and the year Tim was at Clemson and I was still in high school, we’ve never lived more than a few miles apart. We shared some of the same elementary, middle, and high school teachers, though not at the same time, since Tim was a year older. We felt so very old driving around town and pointing out buildings and locations to our kids, saying, “That used to be a Blockbuster. The Fast Fare used to be right on that corner. We used to play with kids in this neighborhood. The lot where those apartments are used to be a giant field of kudzu.” One of the first things that greeted us as we got off of the interstate, was the Bi-Lo grocery store on Reidville Road. Tim and I expressed surprise that it still exists, since so many other things have changed over the years. We told the kids that this was the place where our romance began. You see, one night, Tim had stopped at the Bi-Lo to cash his McDonald’s paycheck. He managed to lock himself out of his truck. My family had stopped at the Bi-Lo to grab something (can’t remember what) on our way home from church on a Wednesday night. When my parents got back in the car, I pointed out Tim McKay, a guy from my math class, and that he seemed to be locked out of his truck. Dad drove over and asked if he could help, but Tim said that his stepdad was already on his way. As we left, my mom asked me all kinds of questions about him and gushed over how cute she thought he was. Fast forward a month or so to prom season, and I was whining about not having a date. Mom suggested that I could ask that cute guy from the Bi-Lo parking lot if I REALLY wanted to go that badly. She kept pestering me, until I finally said I’d ask him (with little hope that he’d actually want to go with a geeky junior like myself). I passed him a note one day after class, because I was WAY too shy to ask him face to face; he called me that afternoon to accept. And here we were, driving past that same Bi-Lo more than 26 years after that encounter. Reagan suggested we get a picture. So on our way out of town, we drove into the parking lot, and I snapped this picture with my phone.

It wasn’t until I had kids and became an avid scrapbooker that I realized the importance of documenting our life, for us and for future generations. The older I get, the more nostalgic I become. I want to savor every moment of time together, and I want to remember what we’ve shared. Every ordinary bit of it. The proposal was anything but grand, the wedding was simple but lovely, our beginnings were ever so humble. But this marriage continues to evolve, flourish, strengthen; it’s a magnificent tapestry of beauty that might show some fraying in places, but is still being woven, and with new threads being added every day, it will not be unraveled. This boy that I fell head-over-heels in love with is the man with whom I still want to spend the rest of my days, whether they be mundane or full of adventure. And with each passing year, I’m learning that no part of our story is too dull to be photographed.