Once Upon A Time
Monday I made a very quick trip to Tyler, Tx for Haven’s memorial service. Tyler is a great town that holds a lot of awesome memories for me. It’s the town where I went to college, learned how to do stage makeup and freak out friends with fake hemotomas, learned sign language, fell in love with botany, wrote in the back of a truck in the pouring rain while beating a drum, met my best friend Jana, dated a guy that had a storm trooper costume (not Damion), took all the tires off my car in a wreck when I was trying to avoid hitting a pig and basically grew up.
Most importantly it’s the place that I met Damion, the place that I refused his first request for a kiss, fulfilled his later request for a first kiss, drove back to sobbing when we broke up, and later married him when he realized the error of his ways. (just kidding, the break up was good for that time in our lives).
Since it had been 5 years since I had been back I was already planning to go back there to visit my friends in the spring and show my kids around my old stomping grounds since I am older than dirt now. Then things happened that sped the course along and Sunday night I packed our bags and we headed out on Monday morning in a heavy horrible rain that later brought some tornadoes to Houston. It rained the entire way there and the temperature kept dropping ever single mile to the north we traveled.
I had planned to take the girls around and take pictures of them in front of the places that were monumental in my life and in the development of our family. But it was rainy and cold and we don’t do cold. I did not get to take them to the zoo, where Damion and I used to go walk because it was still free then. We didn’t go to the Tyler Rose Garden and take pictures in the same spot that Damion and I took our engagement pictures because the garden was more like a mud pie that day. However we did make it to one special fountain with flying geese that happened to be dry that day, even in the pouring rain. The rain stopped long enough for us to hop out and snap a few pictures in front of the fountain where we went on our first date.
Then we drove to the church where we were married and tried to take a few pictures. I say the word try because with one tired child, one child that needed to use the bathroom really badly, and one child that only wanted to go to the hotel already, the pictures didn’t turn out.
Oh and there’s even more funny faces and blank stares but we’ll just leave that for another day because I’m determined to go back and show these girls that once upon a time, mama was a cool cat. Now I’m just a dorky Byrd.
Life4sq says
Love this. Sorry for the reason of your visit, but I love Tyler too. It is a neat town. My parents used to live near there, so we would stay in condos on the outskirts and venture into Tyler to go to the zoo, etc, when the kids were little. Even when they are not all looking, your girls are still all kinds of adorable…
Anonymous says
Thanks Robyn! I love Tyler and I had forgotten how many churches there are there! It’s weird not being in the middle of the bible belt.