Today is my wedding anniversary so it only seems fitting to pick “anniversary” for day “A” of my Blogging from A to Z challenge.

My husband, Owen, and I met at Flying Cloud Airport (FCM) where I was working at the time. Owen called in for aviation fuel, I answered the radio, we started dating and were married less than a year later. Well, the story isn’t quite that simple but, yes, we met through our mutual interest in general aviation, aerobatic flying to be specific. I worked at a fixed-base operator (a place where people rent airplanes, buy aviation fuel and take flying lessons) and Owen was a customer. All of our first dates were aviation related – one involved working on an aerobatic club newsletter together, another was attending AirVenture, the great aviation fly-in in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Perhaps our most significant early date was flying a Super Decathlon out to Sky Harbor Airpark (where we live now) to visit mutual friends. We found out later that our friend said to her husband, “they will be married within the year.” And, guess what? We were!

We had a fast courtship – I think we technically started dating in July of 1993 and got engaged in December. We picked May 1st, as our wedding date and, somehow, managed to plan a wedding in less than six months. May 1st is May Day, a day that signifying spring, so the date felt like a good one for a wedding to both of us. That said, since Owen and I are both pilots and “mayday” is the universal code for distress in pilot-speak, we also felt choosing May Day as our wedding day was kind of a funny little joke that only the pilots at the audience would understand. Turns out, our marriage has been mostly wonderful like spring but, like most marriages, I’m sure, has been punctuated with some times of distress. I’m happy to say we’ve made it through all of our “mayday” emergencies (and have never had one when we’ve actually been in an airplane) and have managed to keep our relationship flying through these twenty-two years.

Here’s to many more happy years, Owen! Happy Anniversary!