Basalt (Something)

A few years ago I was getting a massage at Disney’s Grand Californian. I know. Weird way to start a story about friendship, but stay with me.

Before they took me back, the woman at the front handed me a basket of rocks and told me to pick one. No explanation. No little card telling me what each one meant. No quiz about my personality. Just…pick one.

I reached in and grabbed the ugliest rock in the basket.

It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t colorful. It looked like something you’d kick out of your driveway without giving it a second thought.

Basalt.

I carried it with me until they led me into the spa, where a giant basalt formation sat in the middle of the room. Before the massage started, they asked me to place my rock on top with everyone else’s. I did exactly that, enjoyed one of the best massages of my life, flew home, and never thought about that rock again.

At least that’s what I thought.

Every morning while I’m brushing my teeth, I look at two pictures that have somehow survived twenty-five years of life. They’ve moved more than twenty times. They’ve survived kids, remodels, church, Washington, and enough packing tape to hold together a small country.

One is a picture of a teenage boy standing on a Southern California beach with a boogie board tucked under his arm. He’s wearing swim trunks, a ridiculous hat, and has absolutely no idea someone is going to tape his picture to a bathroom mirror for the next quarter century.

The other is a faded photo booth strip from the county fair. Two teenagers squeezed into a tiny booth, stealing kisses before they technically belonged to each other.

People have noticed those pictures over the years and asked why they’re still there.

It’s not because I wish I were fifteen again.

Lord, no.

It’s because I know something that boy didn’t.

Technically we met in summer school. He’s a year younger than I am, and if you ask him that’s probably the first detail you’ll hear. The second will be that I was the girl who spilled her soda in math class and got drinks banned for the rest of the summer.

He’s not wrong.

But summer school isn’t where our story really started.

That happened in marching band.

Actually…don’t call it band around him.

“I wasn’t in band.”

“You literally were.”

“I was in drumline.”

Fine.

Drumline.

That’s where we became friends. Long rehearsals. Friday night football games. Bus rides. Standing around after everyone else had gone home because somehow we always had one more conversation to finish. Looking back, I don’t think either of us realized we were quietly becoming each other’s favorite place to land.

The funny part is we weren’t officially dating.

I was busy making plans with somebody else because apparently seventeen-year-old me enjoyed making life dramatically more complicated than necessary. Meanwhile, he’s spent the last twenty-five years introducing himself to close friends as my “hottie on the side,” which still makes me laugh because…he’s not entirely wrong.

One night a bunch of us were playing Truth or Dare. He picked dare, and naturally I dared him to kiss me because subtlety has never really been my thing. He didn’t do it. The game ended, everybody went home, and I figured I’d completely misread whatever this thing was between us.

A little while later there was a knock at my bedroom window.

I slept in the converted back patio of our rental house. The screen had been torn for years, and somehow that’s one of the details I remember most. He smiled and told me he’d forgotten something.

He had not forgotten something.

He looked at me through the broken screen and asked if that dare was still on the table.

Then he leaned in.

Caught his foot on the garden hose.

And practically fell into our first kiss.

If there has ever been a better summary of our relationship, I haven’t found it yet.

Nothing about us has ever been polished. We’ve stumbled into a lot of beautiful things. Sometimes literally.

A few months later his mom was in town. Remember, we still weren’t officially boyfriend and girlfriend because we apparently enjoyed making simple things unnecessarily confusing.

I looked at him and said, “Tell your mom I’m the girl you’re going to marry.”

Way to go, firstborn daughter.

The funny part is I don’t even know if I believed myself yet.

He did.

That might be one of the biggest gifts time has given me. I can look back now and see things I couldn’t see then. I was still trying to figure out who I wanted to become. He already seemed comfortable being exactly who he was.

If someone looked at my music over the last thirty years, they’d probably assume five different women had been sharing my Spotify account. I grew up on The Beach Boys because that’s what Southern California sounded like. Then I found grunge and alternative rock. Then I became absolutely insufferable about country music. He survived more Rascal Flatts than any man who doesn’t actually like country should ever have to endure, and he’ll still tell you the only country band he ever really liked was Rascal Flatts. I’m convinced that wasn’t because of the music. It was because I loved it.

Then came years where my playlists were almost entirely Christian music. These days I’m over here dissecting Taylor Swift lyrics because I love stories hidden inside songs.

Him?

The Beatles.

Always The Beatles.

That’s the thing I’ve been thinking about lately.

I’ve changed stations more times than I can count.

He never once asked me to stop searching.

He just kept riding shotgun.

Four years after that first kiss, I married him.

We hadn’t figured life out. We were barely old enough to rent a car, let alone promise forever. I was nineteen. He was eighteen. We had no idea how many moves were ahead of us, how many jobs we’d work, how many dreams we’d chase, how many times life would ask us to start over.

I thought I was marrying the boy from drumline.

The one with the goofy smile, the quick wit, and the habit of making me laugh when I was trying really hard not to.

I had no idea I was marrying the landscape.

There are people who spend their whole lives looking for someone who will love them. I found someone who simply kept making room for me, and I’ve realized those aren’t always the same thing.

I’ve walked into our kitchen carrying some pretty ridiculous ideas over the years. Starting a photography business. Moving twelve hundred miles away from everything we’d ever known. Going back to school in my forties. Writing a memoir. Starting a blog where I somehow convinced myself that rocks could explain friendship. Some of those ideas worked beautifully. Some of them were far messier than I expected. Through every version of me, he never asked me to become a smaller person so life would feel safer. He didn’t need me to stop dreaming because dreaming made the logistics harder. His question was almost always the same: “What do you need from me?”

People hear the word support and picture someone standing on the sidelines clapping. That’s never been him. Support looked like renting the moving truck. It looked like installing flooring so kids coming home would have bedrooms again. It looked like building treehouses, figuring out sprinkler systems, hauling furniture, and saying yes to one more crazy idea because apparently his wife had another one. Looking back, it wasn’t that he believed every idea would work. He believed I’d figure it out, and if I didn’t, we’d figure it out together.

For years I told people he could fix anything. That’s not actually true. If something breaks around the house now, I’m usually the one saying, “Babe…we have a warranty.” He laughs, kneels down anyway, scratches the back of his head in this funny little motion that looks like he’s strumming invisible guitar strings, and gets quiet. That’s how I know his brain is working. He’ll stare at whatever’s in front of him, turning it over, pulling random knowledge out of places I didn’t even know he stored it. Sometimes he fixes it. Sometimes he doesn’t. The point was never fixing it. The point was understanding it.

Somewhere in the middle of writing this post I realized that’s how he’s loved me too.

Not as someone who needed to be fixed.

As someone worth understanding.

If someone looked at my life from the outside, they’d probably think I reinvent myself every few years. Maybe they’re right. My music has changed. My career has changed. My faith has changed. The way I tell stories has changed. Even the things I dream about have changed. For a long time I wondered if that meant I lacked direction. Now I think I was simply still becoming. Through every version, there was one person who never seemed threatened by my growth. He just kept making room for whoever walked through the door next.

One of my favorite stories happened when I was nineteen and giving birth to our first baby. A nurse pulled him into the hallway and tried to get him “on their side.” He came back completely confused and said, “I thought we were all on her side.”

That sentence has followed us through twenty-five years of marriage.

Years later, after another impossible church meeting, I stood in our bedroom completely exhausted. I had spent weeks trying to convince myself that if I just worked harder, served better, became better, maybe everything would finally settle down. He watched me trying to carry something that was slowly crushing me and quietly said, “If this is what it’s doing to you, we’re done.”

The boy from the hospital hallway never changed sides.

There was another night when I walked into our bedroom carrying a notebook full of things I thought I needed to confess. My hands were shaking because I had rehearsed that conversation a hundred times. Before I read a single word, he reached over, stopped me, and said, “I forgive you.”

He never asked for the list.

He never asked for details.

He chose me before he chose the information.

I’ve thought about that moment more times than he’ll ever know.

For most of our marriage, we lived in survival mode. We moved more than twenty times. We raised four kids. We navigated family heartache, broken cars, broken budgets, church, careers, and all the ordinary chaos that fills a life. I don’t think I ever stopped long enough to really see him because we were too busy trying to keep everyone afloat.

Then we bought our house.

I wanted a home so badly it almost hurt. We’d spent years renting and packing and unpacking. I found this house online before I ever stepped inside. We looked at one other house because that’s what responsible adults do. Then we walked into this one, and I never looked at another.

We got the keys on our wedding anniversary.

I didn’t cry.

Not when we signed the papers.

Not when we unlocked the front door.

Not when we carried in the first box.

I cried a month later.

I was standing by myself in the family room looking around at walls that were still mostly bare. The boxes had finally disappeared, the house was quiet, and for the first time in what felt like decades my body believed something my heart hadn’t caught up to yet.

We’re home.

Not because of the address.

Because I finally had enough quiet to notice who had been carrying the weight beside me the whole time.

That’s when I remembered the rock.

I started reading about basalt and laughed out loud because, of course, this was the stone I picked without knowing why. Basalt isn’t rare. It isn’t polished. Nobody slips it into a velvet box or proposes with it. It begins as lava, survives unimaginable heat, cools over time, and eventually becomes the foundation people build roads, bridges, homes, and entire landscapes on. Most people never notice it because they’re too busy living on top of it.

That’s him.

Not flashy.

Not trying to be admired.

Just quietly load-bearing.

I’ve spent this entire series writing about people who shaped my life. Every friendship gave me something I still carry. Some gave me courage. Some gave me perspective. Some gave me laughter. Some gave me truth. Every one of them helped build the woman writing these stories. I kept trying to figure out what stone belonged to him. Somewhere in the middle of writing this piece, I realized I’d been looking in the wrong place. He was never another gemstone. He’d been underneath every chapter from the beginning.

Not standing in front of it.

Underneath it.

Holding it up.

Every morning I still brush my teeth looking at that teenage boy on the beach and the faded photo booth strip from the fair. I don’t keep those pictures because I miss being young. I keep them because I know something that boy didn’t.

My playlists have wandered all over the map. His never really did. Mine followed every season of my life, every question, every reinvention. His always found their way back to The Beatles. I think that’s why Something belongs here. It never tries to explain why someone matters. It never builds a case or asks permission to love them. It simply says… there’s something. He saw something in me long before I ever saw it in myself. Twenty-five years later, I think I’m finally seeing the something in him that was there all along. Some people spend their lives looking for solid ground. Turns out… I married it.

Turns out I picked the right rock all those years ago.

I just wasn’t writing about him yet.

Song: Something — The Beatles Music has always been part of how I remember people. The songs in this series aren’t literal autobiographies. They’re companions to the story. Sometimes a song understands a person long before I have the words to explain why.