(Note: From now until Valentine's Day I will be chronicling how Mr. Blue Eyes and I met, as well as sharing some personal journal excerpts from the early days/weeks/years of our relationship. WARNING: Journal excerpts will contain large amounts of over-the-top, thick as maple syrup, fresh from the pine tree SAP. I was young and in love and I wrote about it shamelessly. If you are allergic to sap you may want to take a Claritin or just avoid these posts all together. If not, read on or click HERE to see a list of the archived posts.)

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Fast forward... Summer of 1998. Minnesota. Hot. Sultry. Sawdusty.

That summer I was newly single, living on the farm with my parents, working at a little wood cabinet shop, spending a lot of time riding horses and a little bit of time going out with friends. After a hard year at college and the end of a hard relationship, I was sort of quietly lost within myself. My somewhat mindless job afforded me a lot of time to think and reflect, as did the time I spent riding horses, and I was thankful for it.

One fateful weekend night a couple old girlfriends and I decided to go out to one of the local casinos. Don't ask me why... I'm not really a casino goer, I don't gamble, and there was nothing special going on at that particular casino that would have drawn us in. It was totally random.

What was also totally random was running into some guys that my girlfriends knew. I didn't really know them, but I guess I knew of them; kind of the 'small-town everybody-knows-everybody' syndrome. After a few minutes, however, one of them became vaguely familiar.

He was cute. He was sweet. He seemed shy but his eyes twinkled. He was tan from the summer sun and his brown hair was bleached a bit, as was the hair on his arms, which I was drawn to for some reason.

(I know... I was 'drawn' to arm hair? What can I say? I'm just being honest here. For some reason tan forearms with blonde arm hair did it for me. As did the dimples. And the blue eyes.)

We hung around with this group of guys for the rest of the night and now it was my turn to be intrigued. Who was this blonde-armed, blue-eyed man? Where had I seen him before? Why was he so familiar? Why did I just want to scoot up next to him and smell his neck? For the life of me I couldn't figure it out.

As my gal pals and I were driving home, it hit me: He was the guy who had asked me out the summer before. The guy I had turned down. The somewhat inebriated and forward midnight swim partner. Except he was no longer inebriated. Or forward. He was quiet, reserved and respectful. He was all spiffed up and smelled... Yummy. It was my turn to be drawn in.

I spent the better part of the next few days kicking myself... Why hadn't I gone out with him? Why had I turned him down? Why wasn't I drawn to him then, and why was I so drawn to him now? It was almost instinctual... The way I was attracted to him now. It was beyond understanding.

But for the following weeks he seemed to once again disappear from my life. I returned to my secluded wood-working, horseback-riding lifestyle. I thought about him every day. I chastised myself for not taking advantage of his offer a year before. I hoped that we would run into one another again, but I wasn't brave enough to call him. From the little I knew about him he was living about an hour away and only came home to hang out with his friends on some of the weekends. He had an entire life that I wasn't part of and knew nothing about. I didn't feel like I had any right to insert myself into it.

At the end of a long day at the cabinet shop I stood outside talking to a coworker. I was tired. I was hot. I was itchy with sawdust. I turned around to go to my car and there on the windshield wiper was a slip of white paper.

"What?!?" I thought to myself. "What is this? Some advertisement? A parking ticket (in a gravel parking lot)?" It must have been a hard day because I remember immediately thinking the worst.

But it wasn't the worst.

It was the best.

It was a note written on the back of a deposit slip. It said, "Call me sometime..." followed by a phone number, signed by Mr. Blue Eyes. My heart leapt.