When I was 5 and living in Ohio, I watched a boy just a few years older than me mow a lawn near my best friend’s house. I remember thinking he was cute and very young to be mowing. My friend didn’t know who he was because an old lady lived in the house.
Fast forward 15 years and I was living in Indiana and working with a guy that I kind of liked. I was driving back to Ohio one weekend to do my laundry at my parents’ house, and notice that he is driving next to me on the highway. Turns out that his parents live less than 3 miles from my parent’s house and he was going home to visit his folks as well.
Come to find out, he grew up in Arizona, and his grandma lived in a small Ohio town. He visited. One summer. Mowed her lawn, I watched. His parents moved to a small Ohio town near the Grandma years later, and my parents bought a house near his parents. He and I both moved to Indiana, where we met a job.
Stranger yet, we ALMOST met 6 months before we started working together. I was in marketing and had an event at a bar. He ran the kitchen at the bar and would have met me that night. Instead, the police came and shut the bar down that very day due to a bankruptcy that we didn’t know was coming.
We have been married for 21 years.