The Day We (Almost) Met

I've been meaning to write our love story for a while, but I know I will never actually do it unless there's some sort of deadline, schedule, accountability—the kind of accountability that comes from, say, a weekly feature on a blog? Sounds like perfect Memories Monday material to me.

I almost met my future husband when I was a braces-wearing, barely driving 16-year-old picking up my cousin to go to a movie.

I wrote directions to his house on the back page of a notebook full of my angsty teenage poetry. They were on the page just after the List of Qualities of My Future Husband I made in Young Women, and that, my friends, is what you call fantastic.

My cousin McKenzie was in town and I was picking her up to go see a movie. McKenzie and I are related through her father, who is my mom's brother. She was staying with her aunt and uncle on the other side of the family—her mother's sister. I include this complicated family tree in order to make it perfectly clear how Ryan and I are not related.

I followed my scribbled directions across the river, east off Highway 20 and past the golf course to the Olaveson residence, though I hadn't written down their name because I couldn't spell it. I read it on their door knocker when I arrived, sounding out the vowels and reconciling the spelling with the pronunciation I'd already learned. Oh-law-veh-son. Olaveson. Got it.

When I went inside to pick up McKenzie her aunt came to say hello. She seemed to know me through the cousin-of-a-cousin connection—she knew my parents and said they used to live in their ward. After a while the conversation turned to her son, who was a year older than me and had just been elected student body president at Rigby High School.

I had a thing for boys in leadership, but Rigby was my high school's rival so it was sort of a wash. His mother insisted we meet.

After we'd semi-reconciled our differences in 2008.

"Ryan just left, but he's working at the Sno Shack," she said. "McKenzie, you should take Breanna there to meet him."

"That's so weird," I remember McKenzie saying. "He's my cousin. So is she."

"He's not my cousin," I said, playing along just for fun.

But when we finally arrived at the Sno Shack, he'd just left there too. And that was the only interaction I'd have with Ryan Olaveson until four years later.