Our first date was August 25, 1995. We’d been slow dancing around each other for a couple years by then. Met in high school but considered each other a nonentity. Then he was my counselor at church camp. He was tan, melted my heart with his voice, had long hair and mad drumming skills. A year went by. He was dating someone else. I was dating someone else. You know how it is. But finally, finally in August 1995 both of us were at Ottawa University. He asked me out the very first morning of my freshman year. I was eating breakfast in the cafeteria when he walked up to my table. So on the night of the 25th, after so much anticipation and curiosity, we really painted the town. We went putt-putt golfing, saw a movie and ended up out at the lake in the earliest hours of morning sharing a lot about ourselves.

Danny’s happiest memory from childhood was camping in Pisgah National Forest with his family as a child. They hiked into the woods for a day before camping in a meadow. They slid down a rock into the river. His sister carried her guitar all the way, even using its case to hold her clothes at one point. They left their cooler in the stream and went back for it the next day because it was so heavy. They sprawled on a giant rock in the middle of the water to stargaze. He talked about it during our first date and has probably brought it up four or five times a year in the two decades since.

We are currently in North Carolina exploring those beautiful, blue mountains, scrambling over rocks, running our hands through ice cold water and experiencing first hand Danny’s past. We left our truck on the side of the road and followed wooden signs out of the modern world and into Vanderbilt’s former backyard. I took pictures at a nameless waterfall but couldn’t immediately Instagram them because my phone was out of service. Danny wandered off, hiking up above us and was gone for almost half an hour while the girls played house using rocks as plates and I sat in the sun with my eyes closed. We scouted for a loud woodpecker. Paige steered us down a path that wasn’t a path at all but led to a quiet pond and we tossed rocks and watched the ripples expand. We picked up baby pinecones (and put them back; we are forest rangers in training). We visited with other hikers, pet their dogs and told the ones trekking behind us that yes, it was worth it to keep going to the top.

Maybe our girls will tell their kids of this happy memory some day.

We hope so.