George and I headed to Nashua, New Hampshire yesterday to visit Matt and Kristen. I am absolutely in love with their home. It is the perfect New England Victorian... enormous, cavernous, and charming. It is even renovated with modern conveniences. Ooops, there is the real estate agent in me blabbing away. OK, I do have a thing for homes...that's why I went into that occupation...but theirs really stole my heart. It even has a bomb shelter in the basement. That was a surprise they found after they bought the place. It was built during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it's stocked with jugs of water from the early 1960s. This photo was actually taken in their bomb shelter just as I was teasing them for being the happy survivalist couple.
I knew Matt and Kristen from 1998 when I lived in Phoenix, Arizona. At the time I was living in the Paradise Lakes apartment complex with Kevin before we married. Funny, that was the apartment complex where I was living when I met George too. George was a stray that was left behind by one of the renters. This turned out to be my luck, because George adopted me and we have been a happy couple ever since.
The local bar was the Back Nine, and I used to hang out there with Kevin, or my friend Catherine, quite often. We had a little bit of a bar clique at the Back Nine, but I lost touch with everyone except for Matt and Kristen. Matt was on a four month work-visa from the UK, and joked about not wanting to return home and wanting to get "hitched". Well, a few months after, Matt met Kristen. After maintaining a two year long distance romance via letters and emails, and visits, they were married. Oh... remember letters? It is so romantic...no wonder they are such a happy couple after ten years. I think they shared milkshakes too.
I always liked Matt very much, but our friendship was always a casual one.. It is kind of amazing that we have stayed in touch for all these years. We only knew each other for a period of a few months back in 1998. Yet, after all this time...there I was... in their home, meeting their children, eating pizza, and spending the night. I was so touched by the hospitality and generosity they showed me. It is encouraging to see this kind of openness in people that are in my age group. It seems to me that a lot of people shut down to new experiences as they get older. It does take some guts to open your home to a casual friend you haven't seen in ten years. I have always been quite a bit more outgoing than most people I know, but the older I get, the wider the gap seems to get. From my point of view, shutting down to new people is one of the most common and unfortunate things that tends to happen to people with age. You can Botox, tuck and lift all you want, but I believe an open heart is the gateway to eternal youth.
