One of the special things about settling in the DC area for
Allison and me is spending time in the city where we fell in love. Back in the summer of 2003, I had just
finished my studies at seminary and was getting ready to begin as a teacher at
a boarding school near Hagerstown.
Allison was a public policy student completing her mandatory student
internship at a organization on Capitol Hill.
I’d meet her after work in the grand hall of Union Station and we’d head
off to one of those free concerts at the Kennedy Center or we’d sit and talk in
one of those pleasant little parks near the Capitol, or share a meal in that
most exotic and romantic locale, the food court in the basement of the train
station.
Sometimes, when we’ve got the
kids in the backseat and we’re headed off to a museum on the Mall or to see a
friend who lives across town, we’ll drive by one of these places and tell them
a little about what it meant to us then.
So much that has happened since then that we never expected, but many of
the good things we do enjoy now were planted there. Going back to those places, we fall in love
again, or at least we understand something valuable about the love we share
now, something we can only discover there, where it all began.
