Chip and Joanna Gaines

JOANNA

The morning of May thirty-first, two thousand and three, I sat in a small room inside the Earle-Harrison House and listened to Waco wake up.

It was barely eight o'clock. The windows were tall and old and let the light in sideways, the way light moves in old Texas buildings - slow, deliberate, amber. Someone had set out a vase of white garden roses on the dresser, and the smell of them was the kind of smell that does not belong to the present. It belonged, already, to memory. To the story I would someday tell.

I was not yet married. I was not yet Joanna Gaines. I was Joanna Stevens, twenty-five years old, daughter of Jerry and Nan, Baylor graduate, sometime shop clerk, full-time dreamer-of-things-that-hadn't-happened-yet. My mother was down the hall. My dress was hanging in the corner, white and simple, and the sight of it still surprised me a little - not with dread, but with the clean shock of realizing that something you imagined for a long time is, today, actually real.

I thought about Chip.

I thought about how he had found me through a photograph, which sounds like something that happens in movies, except it happened in a tire shop in Waco, Texas, which is not a setting anyone ever puts in a movie. I thought about how he had shown up, and kept showing up, and made a joke out of his persistence so that I wouldn't notice how sincere it was underneath. I thought about how he laughed - that big open laugh that reaches every corner of the room and doesn't ask anyone's permission.

I thought about the years ahead, which I couldn't see.

Nobody warned me that marriage is not a destination. It is a direction. You don't arrive at it on a Wednesday in May when you're twenty-five years old, surrounded by white roses and the amber light of a Texas morning. You begin it. And then you spend the rest of your life deciding, over and over again, to keep going in that direction. To choose it even when it costs you something. To build it the way you build a house - carefully, with good materials, with the understanding that the work is never really finished.

I didn't know any of that yet. Or maybe I knew it the way you know something in your bones before you know it in your mind.

I stood up. I walked to the window. Outside, the Waco morning was going about its business - birds, a delivery truck, a man walking a dog on the far sidewalk. None of them knew this was the most important day of my life.

But then again, that is how the most important days work. They look, from the outside, exactly like an ordinary morning.

I put my hand on the glass.

I was ready.