Dave and I are typical. We are essentially the same age, although I am 1 year and 3 months older, which he LOVES to remind me of every year on my May birthdate when I am 2 years older for the summer until he “catches up” with me and is only a year behind. It turns out that marrying older women runs in both our families. His mother is older than his father and my grandmother was older than my grandfather, so we didn’t get any crap on that when we were dating.
We met in college and got married after Dave graduated in 1981 from Cornell University.
He graduated, we got married, moved, both started new jobs and bought a house all in a month! I now wonder if we set the tone for the drama to come later in our lives and I look back on it, not with regret, but with the sense that perhaps I could have been a little less “efficient” and “enjoyed the journey” a bit more.
We moved from beautiful Ithaca, in upstate New York, to the Washington, DC burbs in Maryland. I didn’t want to leave Ithaca. I loved it there. But Dave hated the cold and didn’t have nearly as much fun as I did. Being in the Electrical Engineering program at Cornell meant he was buried in his studies. I, on the other hand, had a job I enjoyed, friends and a social life. I often say, I had all the fun of being an Ivy League Student and NONE of the responsibilities. It was a wonderful time for me. But we picked up and made our move to Washington, DC, which I also loved, as a city. However, I never got to live in Washington. I got stuck in the burbs and I hated it for a very long time. I discovered that I loved the country, small towns, and big cities. I could have any of them. I’m a military brat, so adaptability and flexibility is something ingrained in my very existence. Living out in the middle of nowhere with everyone else piled on top of each other with nothing to do where cars are required, was not something, I discovered, that I cared for. I learned to appreciate fully why people live in the suburbs and what it has to offer in raising your children and making friends, but it is still on the bottom of my list of places I would choose to live. Whenever I would get annoyed with Dave, I would remind him, that I didn’t want to move here, that he said we were moving to Washington, DC and that I had yet to get anywhere close to living in DC! However, I was committed, to our marriage and his success in his career as a telecom engineer. As a seasoned military brat, I adapted and made the best of it, and I did appreciate the people I met and the experiences we had living there for 27 years.
We have two children, our son, Hudson (named after my father, Lt Col James Webster Hudson) and our daughter, Montana. They kept us busy with all their activities.
