I almost never met Jeremy

A long time ago, when I was a sophomore in college, I lived in a place called Provo with my sister and some roommates who were truly out of this world. We used to sit around and marvel that the group of us ever happened to live together because we all got along THAT well and liked each other THAT much. And besides the fact that I was bummed my sister and I didn't get the biggest bedroom, I pretty much loved my life with these roommates. Except for when I forgot to start the dishwasher one night and they woke me the next morning by singing Michael Jackson's Bad.

Anyway, as the end of the winter semester approached, most of us wanted to continue living together, but we didn't all have the same summer plans. Sissy and I (oh! and Melanie) wanted to stay in Provo for the Spring/Summer terms, while others wanted to go back home to work and save money and so on. We all promised to live together again someday, if possible, and put ourselves on the waiting list to get an apartment in . . .

The Elms

The Elms was THE coveted place to live, and there was a long waiting list to get in. That semester I ran into a high school friend who lived in The Elms and told her we were going to be moving in in the spring. She said "you'll never get in" in kind of a snobby way. But here's the thing: we did get in. We had to pay about a thousand dollars up front to secure our spots, but we were in.

The day we moved in, we were in for a shock. This apartment had someone living in it already. And she hadn't cleaned up to welcome us. We came in to a disaster of a kitchen. Dirty dishes that looked (and smelled) WEEKS old. The mini-crockpot full of a foul-smelling mystery goo was the worst thing we had to clean up. That's right, we moved in and cleaned the place up just so we could stand it.

Melanie was beside herself. After all, she had to share a room with this messy Jennifer person. And living there the first week, it didn't get any better. Jennifer worked at Denny's until 2 o'clock every morning, and she would come home after work and disrobe in the front room (leaving her Denny's apron and underthings on the floor) while watching movies on her rented TV/VCR and flinging sunflower seed shells all over the room. We would find this mess, or variations of it, every morning.

But still, the nights Jennifer worked were a little better than the nights when she didn't. Those nights, her boyfriend would come over and they would make themselves a nuisance on the couch, her saying "what do you want for dinner tonight?" and him answering with "neck of Jen, ah ha ha ha ha ha." Or they would fight. Fun times.

After only a few days of this, Sissy, Melanie and I were reconsidering. Sure, this apartment complex was right next to campus and supposedly full of fun cool people, but it was more expensive than our last place, which held so many happy memories for us, and the cleanliness factor and the roommate factor were enough to send us running back to Centennial (our old complex) to see if they still had space for us.

They DID! I was 100% behind moving back. Sure, it would be a hassle to move again, and we'd lose some of our thousand bucks paid to The Elms, but there were still people on the waiting list to move in if we gave up our spots.

But, we wouldn't be in the same apartment as we'd been in before at Centennial, and the roommates we'd have in the new apartment would be iffy, too. Melanie didn't want to lose the money, and something told me that I was trying hold on to the good times of the past and not face the challenges of the future. But I knew it wouldn't be the same if we moved back to Centennial.

After some hemming and hawing, we decided to stay at The Elms. Maybe Jen would move out by the end of the summer (she did) and maybe this other new roommate, Jenae, would turn out to be as cool and fun as she seemed (she did).

In fact, maybe this person Jenae would turn out to have such a profound impact on the course the rest of my life would take, that it's now hard to believe I almost passed up the chance to be her friend and live in that apartment complex that summer.

In fact, it would only be a few weeks before Jenae and I would both watch as a young man with long sideburns and old school horn-rimmed glasses stood in front of the microphone at church and sang a beautiful baritone solo with no accompaniment. In Hungarian. And it wasn't long after that that Jenae was holding his hand and bringing him to our apartment to hang out.

A lot happened in the fourteen or fifteen months between Jeremy's first visits to our apartment in the Elms and our wedding day, but if we'd moved back to Centennial and I'd never lived in The Elms nor had Jenae as a roommate, I don't know how Jeremy and I would ever have met.

So glad we did.