Jeeze, Julia!

♥

I never thought I would be one of those girls…

The kind who get so completely giddy over their engagement that they announce it dramatically on facebook and recount the entire proposal night minute by minute. I mean, I always knew I’d be happy and excited about it, but I didn’t peg myself for the type of lady who wanted to share pictures of the ring online and giggle about the wedding planning process with her best friend. I also never thought I’d be the type of person who gushes when they see a movie star, though, and that moment when I bumped into John Krasinski in New York was truly one of my low points. So, here I am sharing pictures online and learning a little more about my reaction to big life events in the process. I’ll be honest, though – I love reading other peoples’ engagement stories, so why not share my own?

* And since this venue is exclusively mine, not shared space with every person I’ve met from elementary school through post-college as facebook is, I figure if you’re here and reading this you won’t mind. So here we go, the story:

When I dream, I don’t see anything. I have feelings and I know things – if I’m dreaming that someone is chasing me through a park, I’ll just know that I’m in a park and have a feeling that someone is chasing me. I don’t see the trees or the grass or the person who is trailing me. So, last month when I had a dream that Ryan proposed to me with a beautiful twig ring that I actually saw, it felt very significant. The feelings in this dream were particularly strong. I woke up with the biggest smile on my face, and the image of the ring stamped into my brain. I saw it so clearly – a white gold ring, textured and shaped like a twig, with a tiny little diamond set into its center.

I sat up in bed and tried to get a grip on myself. Nothing had changed or happened… I just had a dream. But the dream was so real, so visual, that I just couldn’t get over it. I thought at first that I should just keep it to myself. I didn’t want to tell Ryan and have him feel pressured or weird, but I ended up mentioning it later on anyway {because we can’t keep anything from one another…}. It didn’t really seem to phase him, so I just forgot about it, too. Little did I know, he then set out to find someone to design the exact ring from my dream.

This Wednesday we both worked long shifts. At the end of the day we went home, put on our pjs and a Supremes record, and decided to celebrate being home. It was then, as we danced with joy at the end of our long day, and my “Friday” night, that he got down on one knee and presented me with the ring. At first I didn’t even see it. I felt awful for him being down there alone on the floor, waiting a few very long seconds for my answer, I hated to think that he was stressed, nervous, or unsure, so I got down on the floor, too, and wrapped my whole body around him in a hug. We giggled, and kissed, and promised each other forever, and I had barely even looked at the ring.

But when I drew back and gave him my hand, I looked more closely and realized I had seen it before! After hearing about my dream, he had it designed by Kristin Coffin, a native New Hampshirite whose policy on eco-consciosness is just the same as mine. All of the metals she uses are recycled, and the diamonds are conscientiously harvested. She cast my ring from an actual little twig – I don’t think this ring could be more perfect for me, and there’s none other in the world like it.

Ryan told me that he had planned on proposing to me this weekend in the canoe out in the middle of my lake. He picked up the ring on Wednesday morning and carried it around in his pocket at work all day, his hand darting downward to feel the little circle through the denim every couple of minutes. But later that night, while we danced and sang, he said he couldn’t stand to think of it in his pocket instead of on my finger for even a minute longer. At home in our pjs listening to records – what could be more us?

xx.

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