“Oh, there are so many, but the one that feels most right now is watching my now-husband act thoroughly bizarre on the beach in the Basque town of Deba last summer…
He and I had spent the day bicycling from San Sebastián, with all our clothes for several days on our backs. We had stopped for lunch at the port town of Getaria and eaten goose barnacles and drank Txakoli. Then we stopped at the top of a mountain and ate peaches then promised to meet each other at the bottom of the long descent, at nearly sunset, into Deba. We got the last available room in the hostel in town, ate sheep’s cheese and drank hard cider we’d bought earlier in the day, then walked the few meters to the beach to watch the very end of the day…
Pete was terribly jumpy, and kept running off to collect shells, then looking back at me, then running further. I couldn’t figure out why he was so frazzled and odd. Then suddenly, he jogged back to me and asked me to play a shell game we’d learned in another Basque town a few days earlier, which involved guessing how many shells were in each hand. I got it wrong, but he told me to turn over one of the shells in his hand, where I found his grandmother’s tiny, plain gold wedding band. And then he got a knee in the damp sand, and asked my hand in marriage, which I granted.
I know it’s all a horrible cliché, and we knew it then. It happened, and I remember it, and it is mine, nonetheless…”
