Q&A: Header Art and the Story of Us

Mayhem asks: Who made your cool new header?

The nifty header art is by Calliope. She is creative, fast and working with her is a real pleasure. I sent her a rambling, garbled vision which may as well have been, "I want something sort of like a circle combined with a square. I don't like triangles. I like ovals, ovals are cool. And rectangles. But maybe it should have some triangles." She somehow sorted through it to come up with a bunch of neat ideas, one of which eventually ended up here. I totally recommend her.

Also, How did you and your husband meet?

T likes to tell people that we met in Africa, but it's not really true. I got to spend the summer before my senior year of college in Ghana on one of those cross-cultural, see-the-rest-of-the-world sort of projects. There were seven of us: four women from my school and three men from another nearby college. T was one of those men.

The group met up a handful of times before we left. Both T and I came out of those meetings thinking the same thing: "Five of the other team members are cool, but I can't believe I have to spend the summer with her/him." I thought he was an outsize personality who never shut up. He wondered why I was even part of the project if I would never say anything.

Our hosts often scheduled a siesta for us during the hottest part of the day. Sometimes when we weren't tired, we'd play cards in the courtyard of the guest house. Often T and I were the only two there. I started to see what a kind, fun person he was. He realized that when I did speak, it was because I had something worthwhile to say. And we became good friends.

He came back from that summer with a huge crush on me. I came back thinking he was a great guy. Three years later we started dating (including one in which I was a campus minister at his school while he was still a student and stupidly ignored him for an entire semester in hopes of avoiding a scandalous love affair). Two more years and we were married.