On our 4th Anniversary

Where we first met: Holder Hall

Freshman year

Terrace Houseparties (maybe junior year?)

Our wedding day

Dosas in Mysore

The joys of photobooth

At home in Penryn
At the lake in Maine

At Dash's with Iddli & Squiggles

I can't believe I'm posting this one...Terrace Houseparties again :)

Wedding

Dosas at Hilltop. Who's the mountain man?

Graduation day

Wait...what? Golden KIS Awards

At the beach in Malibu: sea urchins are cool

Yosemite National Park for our first anniversary

In DC

The 'Mini Taj' in Aurangabad

The Taj Mahal in Agra

Santa Barbara

The 80 mile hike to the Ibex Cliffs

Will and I got married four years ago today. It was a beautiful summer afternoon in Upstate New York, and we could hardly have been happier. The ceremony, a brief exchange of words and a kiss, was held outside among black-eyed susans on the lawn of a retirement community. Elders of the community held impromptu viewing parties from their balconies and critiqued my dress--too creamy, too short, not enough like a bride of yore. They were happy, though, to witness the first and only wedding on their premises. A splash of youth among the elders. A party. Music--a band! And what good food. The cooks in the retirement community had never heard of baba ganoush. They looked up recipes for hummus and pita bread, put in orders for pounds of tahini.

The days prior to the wedding were utter chaos, but the villages that raised us pooled their collective energy and everything came together. Life. Balance. Union. Drama. People came together. Jars of wild flowers were amassed and arranged. The corset to go under my gorgeous Liz-made dress was accidentally left in New York City. A search party went out to find a new one. On the lawn in Forest Home, a true home to many, myself included, a friend whose wedding I was in as a flower girl long ago and not so far away tried on my corset. This man is well over six feet tall. A crisis was averted with hilarity.

Snippets: Will’s mom, Margi, reading a poem she wrote about us while wearing tiger-striped sunglasses in honor of our alma mater. My father raises his glass to toast us, sharing an embarrassing but sweet story from my youth. A total surreality to everything. Everything hazy but such happiness to see these friends and family members all in one place. A village that had always hitherto been scattered across this country and several more. How was it possible that we were all together? But we were.

My brother gave me my favorite gift at the rehearsal dinner. He read us a beautiful story of childhood and growing up, and it was just perfect. I wept with pride for Aaron, and with sheer happiness to see him standing there, reading something beautiful he wrote for us, strong and happy and good. Will is my best friend, and so is my brother.

Since that day, four years ago, Will and I have lived in two very different places. For the first two years we lived in Los Angeles, that crazy city of driving and my family and a hodgepodge of jobs. Will and Aaron became brothers during that time, and for that I will always be grateful. My parents’ home there has become a home I know and love, and my parents have gotten to know Will and I as we are together, and for that I will always be grateful. During college, during the first four years that Will and I were together, my family lived on two continents with me in North America and the rest of them in Asia. At times during those first two years of our marriage all of us, plus Will, my new family, were under one roof.

Then, one evening in late spring (our second in LA), Will and I had a phone interview to a land far away. We came back outside to where my parents and a couple of friends were sitting among the flowers at a white table covered in delicious beautiful food, and we glowed because we almost certainly had the job. We had started our journey to India.

Now, having lived here for two years, it’s hard to imagine a time without India. This hill station has become our home. Here, where the bison roam, we have grown into our marriage together, far away from most of the village that saw us married four years ago. Now our village has grown to include many more friends who are like family. Our immediate family has grown to include our intrepid hiking-wagging-barking-but-not-so-much-swimming dog, Iddli, and two kittens, Mango and Tikka. We live in a house surrounded not by boulevards and avenues, taquerias and nail salons, but by tall trees full of cicadas chirping in waves of rattling noise, by bison the size of your car who munch audibly outside our living room windows as our potbellied stove radiates warmth throughout the house. We have grown to love a life without television, but with DVDs and books galore. Our power is cut every afternoon for a couple of hours, and quite frequently in the evenings, and we are grateful for candles, board games, our guitar, and the laptop battery.

Four years into our marriage we are happy together. Our wedding seems like a very long time ago, but in even deeper recesses of my memory sit thoughts of our meeting at school almost nine years ago, wandering around campus late at night getting to know each other, being kids together not much older than the students Will teaches now. When we met I made sure Will knew that my future, with or without him, would include adventures and lots of travel. Little did I know that Will would cope even better than I with the stresses and complications that come with a life abroad. This man who spent the great majority of his childhood in the US can now eat thalis with his hands like a South Indian, can ride a Royal Enfield from the 1970s, can look a bison or a wild elephant square in the face without flinching. This man survived the glacier at the source of the Ganges crashing down upon him. With this man, I’m pretty sure I could go anywhere.