It snowed in Chapel Hill once. Real snow, the kind that shuts a southern town down completely because nobody owns a plow and nobody wants to. On the third day of it (third day! everything closed, whole town gone soft and lawless) i was lying on a giant bean bag with a friend wedged between us like a chaperone nobody hired, and on the other side of that friend was Allison, and I leaned across the whole arrangement and asked her out. day three of a snow day. that is the actual record.

Here is the strange part: I don't remember meeting her. not the moment, not the day. some people you can't find the start of, she was just already there when i checked. that's probably the truest thing i can tell you about her.

we were college kids on poplar ave with a bad mattress and no plans, and i could not tell ya what we talked about that first winter, i was too busy looking at her. then college ended and the world said scatter and we didn't. she got serious about energy, the actual grid, the actual electrons (my wife keeps the lights on while i teach computers to make cow noises), and when the work called her to california i went, no hesitation, packed up the dog and drove west. that move made everything after it possible and it was HER move. i just had the sense to be luggage.

I proposed on top of Sentinel Dome in Yosemite, fall of 2020, on granite that has been sitting there a hundred million years minding its own business (the geology degree finally paying for itself). if you're gonna ask a forever question, you should probably be standing on something that means it. She said yes. she is good at yes. you'll see.

We married on May 21, 2022, and the week before was a comedy. Our friend Kyle, my college roommate all four years, was pulling double duty as officiant AND best man, one man holding both jobs, and five days out he calls: someone at his utah camping weekend tested positive for covid. lots of eggs in our sweet kyle basket and no way to know til wedding day if they'd all be cracked. i wrote my whole job down in one line that week: keep my love easy and don't drown. the eggs held. Kyle stood up there and married us and best-manned us in the same breath, and the day was one for the books, incredible at every turn. We spent our wedding night at a little inn on the sausalito waterfront staring out at richardson bay, the anchored boats, the dark water, mount tam behind it all, with absolutely no idea we were looking at our future front yard. more on that later.

Two weeks in Fiji, then back to work jetlagged and grinning like fools, and then the years started stacking up quietly the way good ones do. Anniversary one: wine country, a fancy dinner where the owner heard Al liked sambuca and went and HUNTED DOWN a bottle of it (that is the effect she has on strangers). anniversary two: dinner at an old inn by the sea and matching indigo-dyed sweats, cotton for the cotton year, bc we are romantics of a very specific weight class. anniversary three: i got up before dawn on the boat and cooked her eggs and bacon while the tide came up slow under the floor. goodness, another year another dollar, i do love my sweet Yeallison. anniversary four, this may: everything strawberry..... don't ask. it made her laugh and that's the entire economy i work in.

And here is who she is. A few months after the wedding she walked away from the safe job (a year in, fast-tracked, praised) to be the second employee at a startup. second! an act of pure nerve. i sat there writing damn am i proud of my wife over and over like a kid filling up a chalkboard. She plays every ridiculous game I build: first player, first laugh, first bug report. in the cow game the hero cow is named al. is allison, lol, i wrote in the design notes, and i stand by the scholarship. every december she flies us to miami for christmas with her fambambly and i sit on the plane trying to finish some absurd holiday game for her family to play on the television before we land. that is what i bring to her people: nonsense, shipped on time or close to it.

and the third crew member: Lady. german shepherd, acquired 2018 in durham when we were still east coast people, traveled west with us like a duffel bag with opinions. lady of the many names (LMP, little miss pants, lechuga, lechuggalo, joeey thermos), lady the bread thief who has eaten maybe fifteen full sourdough loaves across her career and never once slowed down. she lies on our feet while we work and performs the office of slippers, hell, four-star cutest slippers i ever saw. she got scary sick the week before the wedding, stopped eating, and i came apart a little. then she recovered by climbing on my head at dawn and committing a crime on the carpet. that's dogs. that's the whole contract.

february of 2025 made it ten years since the bean bag. ten years since day three of the snow. we lay around that night talking about how we'd entered some third era: college, then the scrambling after, and now this, the actual adulthood. and it doesn't feel heavy the way i feared adulthood would. it feels like more snow days. longer ones, better provisioned.

because here is her genius, the yes. when i said what if we lived on a boat? she looked at me the way she looked at me across that friend on the bean bag, like she'd already decided before i finished asking. when i said what if we SAILED, what if we went far? she got out a chart. she plays the games. she reads the wind. she picked the cow's name.

so when i tell you we did the strangest, most correct thing a couple can do in this economy (bought an old houseboat and moved onto the water we stared at on our wedding night), understand it was not me convincing her. it was two people and a dog walking down a dock. but the boat gets its own chapter.