The Beginning

In honor of this

That will soon be released, I've decided to take a trip down memory lane, and I hope you'll all do it too!

Ok, so I don't have a catchy title like Ree does, but you get the drift.

There once was a wild teenage girl, fresh out of high school, anticipating the day she left for college...and then all of a sudden, BAM! "Toby's single?!? I always thought he just had a girlfriend from somewhere else..." They kissed, fell in love, and lived happily ever after. Ok, maybe not quite.

I'm not sure what provoked me that 4th of July night when we were all hanging out at the lake watching the fireworks to ask Toby if he had a girlfriend. My two good friends in high school were dating older guys who just happened to be two of Toby's good friends, so we all hung around a lot. Yeah, I thought he was a good looking cowboy, but I just assumed all along that he had a girlfriend from somewhere. I mean, how could he not?!? So, that night when I got the courage to ask, you can only guess what he said.

"Nope."

*Really surprised look on my face*

"Oh, ok, then how come we've never gone out before?"

"I don't know. Probably because you were in high school."

"Ok, well, I'm not now, so let's go out sometime."

"Ok, sounds good."

That's all it took. We were destined to be together. Except there was one little detail we both weren't sure would go over too good with our folks...he is 7 years older than me. So, for the next few weeks, we kept our romance hush-hush. He would pick me up from work at 10 PM, throw me a beer, and we'd talk nonstop for the next two hours until I had to be home. One particular night, we were cruising the back roads when all of a sudden, a deer jumped out from the ditch and we hit it with the grill guard. No damage to the pickup, and of course it killed the deer, but what happened next was the very moment that I fell in love with that cowboy. He stopped the pickup, got out, drug the deer off the road, got back in and said,

"Oh. Sorry. I guess you probably want me to drop you off now, huh?"

*Me with my jaw on the floorboard*

"Nah, I'm good. I kinda liked it."

To this day, we still joke about that night. He says he just acted out of instinct when he got out to drag it off the road, but while he was out of the pickup, he realized that it probably wasn't very gentleman-like to drag a dead deer off the road while your date sat in the pickup.

Anyway, back to our hush-hush relationship. One day, my mom came up to my room, sat down at my vanity, and while plucking her eyebrows said,

"So...have you been going out with Toby Snyder?"

*Me: trying to think of something to say...*

"Well..."

"Because Kayla said that Tray said that Toby had to leave the roping early because he had a date, and they thought it might be with you because he left the arena right after you did. So are you?"

"Yeah..."

"Oh, ok. That's great!"

"Really? You mean I've been trying to hide this for a month now because I thought you and Dad would be mad that he's so much older than me, and all along you wouldn't have cared!?!"

The rest of that summer, we were inseparable.

More to come...