Time to start looking back

So in a short – countable – amount of time I will become a married woman.  The last few days of single life have gotten me thinking about this incredible journey that has led me here, back to Pennsylvania ready to settle down and become a wife.  I have five years of kitchen experience – if you count my fry cook/ hamburger slinging days in high school.  I have 2 diplomas, both with a Summa Cum Laude typed into them.  I have friends who have been with me every step of the way and some who I just knew for a short time.  Every one of them has impacted my life in some way.  And of course through it all I have had – for the last 3 years at least – a supportive man by my side, my biggest fan.

So for him – because some of these stories even he hasn’t heard – I want to begin to share my countdown to married life.  My opus of sorts.  The tears, lessons, and laughs that have brought me here.

Oregon, 2008 – Oregon was my first taste at being an adult.  In my Sophomore year at Johnson & Wales University, I took a baking and pastry internship at Sunriver Resort in Sunriver, Oregon. My time in Oregon taught me so much more than how to work in a commercial bakery.  Oregon taught me how deranged cocaine can make a person, before the Charlie Sheen incident.  It taught me that making muffins is truly an art.  Either that or I was just talented enough to be one of only two people who could manage not to mess them up in the bakery.  But most importantly Oregon taght me how to ride a bicycle.

My dad always said my middle name should have been grace, because then I would have at least had some grace in my life.  I gave up learning how to ride a bicycle at the ripe old age of 6.  My six-year-old reasoning had decided that such experience would not be a necessary contribution to my life experiences.  And then I picked an internship in Sunriver, Oregon where I was given a bike and told that the bike would be my primary method to get to work.

My first serious bike accident was because my groceries were uneven on my handlebars.  The bike tipped, my arm went into the rocks, my knee followed.  I took pictures.  Before my internship was over, I had ruined 3 bikes.  I fell over the side of the bike.  I flipped over the handlebars.  I slid out on an inch of snow coming down a hill.  And somehow I managed to bump my knee repeatedly on the side of the bike while going uphill until it was sore and bleeding.  I fit what should have been a minimum of 6 years of childhood experience-related injuries into 6 months of trial and error.

Throughout it all, I learned that I am horrendously stubborn and that my dad should have fought harder to add grace to my name.  Or maybe I should have known saying at 6 that you will never need a skill is certainly a dooming commentary on a skill you will be forced to learn.

Here begins the countdown.  I know as Matt’s wife I will need to learn some things.  I will probably fall a few times, but cuts and scrape heal.  I’ve definitely gotten enough of them to know that!

Happy Eating!!!

Emily