Jeremy and Sarah met while teaching at Catalina Foothills High School in the year 2008. For one year, they spoke only during department and grade-level meetings because their classrooms were in different buildings on CFHS's ridiculously sprawling campus. Their first real conversation (about Star Trek, no less) took place over lunch with another coworker between professional development meetings.
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Aerial view of Catalina Foothills High School.
See the cars along the lower right side? They're for scale. :P |
In 2009, Sarah shifted from her classroom in Building 3 to a classroom on the upper floor of Building 4, placing her only three doors down from Jeremy's room. Still, the culture of CFHS encouraged isolation more than community, and the two rarely interacted outside of meetings. It took a chance encounter in one of the teachers' offices for the two to realize how much they had in common, leading to many long conversations after school and over email. This, rather quickly, became intermittent conversation while grading and planning together, as well as conversations over dinner, after movies, and during long walks around downtown Tucson.
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| Along the Supertrail in Madera Canyon, Feb. 6, 2010. |
Two years passed, during which the couple moved in together, tiled 700 square feet of their home, acquired new teaching positions, hiked and camped all over southern Arizona, bought a new car, read many books together, took a ten-day road trip to Oregon and back, worked to open a new high school, built a fort for their new pool table, and climbed Mt. Wrightson on his birthday to watch the Leonid Meteor shower at three in the morning.
Their affection for each other only increased, and on November 11, 2011, as Jeremy and Sarah viewed all of southern Arizona at dawn from 9453 feet for the second time in as many years, he completely surprised her with a diamond ring and asked her to marry him.
She, of course, started crying. And said, "Yes."
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| The view of southern Arizona from 9453 feet, and our first sight as an engaged couple! |
