According to Bill Barrett lore, Robby and I met on the Bauer Rec playground when I was six and he was seven. If I had to guess, I was probably showing off on the monkey bars while an unsuspecting Robby was flying face first down the slide. My memories of Robby begin at Flower Valley Elementary School: the tall, skinny boy in the grade above me. Robby says he can remember me then too, as “the girl with the big head in the grade below me.” Once again, thank you Bill Barrett. Despite bumping into each other in hallways for the next 10 years, it wasn’t until high school that Robby and I became good friends, and it wasn’t until college (with 900 miles between us) that we started dating. It’s true what they say: Distance makes the heart grow fonder. The summer after my freshman year of college I visited Robby in Raleigh, North Carolina. My birthday had recently passed, and as a surprise, Robby took me to Wilmington for a Sunset Kayak Adventure, which included dinner on the beach afterward. Dinner turned out to be two ham sandwiches and a bag of chips, but that evening was so perfect, we didn’t care. That night, Robby asked me to be his girlfriend. Fast forward eight years, Robby found a restaurant on the same river that we first kayaked on and decided that would be the spot he asked me to marry him. Under the guise of a birthday trip for his dad, Robby, Tom, Karen, and I headed down south for a sunny weekend at the beach. Just kidding! There was a hurricane. It was raining Friday evening as we headed into the restaurant. Robby asked if I wanted to walk down to the gazebo while we waited for our table, and I had a hunch something was up when he insisted, despite the inclement weather, on “checking out the gazebo.” Once down by the water, Robby got down on one knee, and I kid you not, the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and there was a beautiful sunset as he asked me to marry him. I said yes, my parents ran down the dock to surprise me, I sobbed like a baby, we popped champagne, and basked in that new-fiancé-feeling for the rest of the night. I haven’t stopped smiling since. As an aside; The hostess turned out to be a Rockville High School alumni. Another wink from the universe that we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be.