Story

David proposed during a visit to Cloudcroft in August 2009. After an afternoon of walking the trails at White Sands National Monument and sledding down the sand dunes, we headed back to the car a bit before sunset. As we reached the car, David got a funny look in his eyes and declared, “I’m going to take something out of the trunk now that’s going to raise a lot of questions, but I’m not going to answer them.” He then proceeded to pull a guitar out of the trunk. It turned out that David had spent the past month secretly learning to play the guitar while on an internship in Washington, DC.

I followed him back out over the dunes with the guitar and sleds in search of a private place. When we found a beautiful spot from which to watch the sunset, David sat down and began to tune. He broke the G string, which is now an anklet, and I worried that the tuning process and the broken string were stressing him out… And then I was serenaded with the song “For Ever and Ever, Amen” as the sun set behind David.

He asked me to marry him, I said, “Of course,” he pulled out his Great Grandma Bess’s ring, and here we are… (First we had to find our way back through the trail-less dunes at night!) -Jessica