On April 7, 1979, Dan and I got married in his parents' backyard. I wore a borrowed dress and platform shoes from Goodwill since the dress was way too long for me. My mom made my veil that morning and picked up some flowers for us at the last minute.
I was 22 years old and Dan was 25. We were not really ready to get married since we barely knew one another and had little money, but were very much in love. We spent the first three years of our marriage living in a commune like house and riding bikes all over Long Beach, California every evening after work and on the weekends. Those were very happy and carefree times.
When I began teaching skating in early 1983, our simple life of riding bikes around the beach town ended, but we still had a lot of fun skating all the time. (I taught Dan to skate.) In addition to ice skating, we were even one of the first people who got to try out the original Rollerblades.
Then, there were the weird years (1988--1991) when we were part of what I think of as a cult-like religious organization in San Francisco and at the end of 1991 we decided to leave San Francisco and the organization's control and moved to Colorado.
Our three children were born in the 1990s and of course changed our lives.
In 2005, Dan was in a horrible accident that also changed our lives, but he recovered and today it seems like that accident and the time that followed is like a distant memory and almost a dream.
In 2019-2020, we really thought we had hit the empty-nest stage when our youngest left home to live in New York City and the two oldest were traveling the world with their jobs with Disney On Ice, but all that changed suddenly in mid-March 2020, when the COVID-19 emergency brought all three of our children back to Colorado.
Who knows what will happen next, but also.....
It's hard to believe that 41 years have passed!
