“I still have your old letters,” said Lorelle, “at least, the important ones. Want to see them?”

So Chris and I spent the next two hours or so reading the letters that began with a twenty-year-old me (mother to baby Jamie, weight 10lbs 3ozs) and ended with a more mature me at thirty. The correspondence chronicled the highs and lows in my young life, and the travels back and forth between Australia and England (all the running away). As we read I smiled, laughed and cried, but mostly I cried. Chris put his arm around me.

“I wish I had known you then,” he kissed me.

Of course, everything that had happened in my youth had paved the way to the rest of my life, and now Chris and I have seventeen years of our own to laugh and cry over (happy times, too, make you cry!). And we’re still making happy memories…