All lovers have a meeting story. No matter how the years past, the details of those first hours and days are indelibly printed on one's memory. Heightened emotion does that - it affects one's recollection of events. Everyone can remember where they were when something intensely bad happened, or intensely good, but they may not recall what happened the day after.
On this snowy morning I'm in Shoreham, near Brighton, where I am staying with a man I just met and that twenty years later I'll be married to him. I'd met him at a friend's sister's house in Somerset, UK, and it was love at first sight, just at a point in my life I thought I was destined to be alone. We spent a weekend tangled together before heading up to Edinburgh for New Year's Eve, me saying I'd see him on New Year's Day. Except he'd given me his wrong phone number, mixing up the last two digits accidentally, and I couldn't get in touch to say the train would be in later due to extreme weather.
The train was meant to come in at 5, but by the time I got to London, it's 8pm. I had to make a decision whether to go the last leg to Brighton and to trust whether he'd be there or not. If he wasn't, I had one friend down there I could possibly stay with. On his end, he was herding a lot of drunken friends toward the pub that was closest to the station - quite the feat, if you knew his anarchic friends. They all lived in trucks on what they called a new traveller site, where they'd squat empty land before being moved on. Jamie lived there in Bedford lorry that used to be a mobile library. Yes, I'd fallen in love with a man who lived in a truck with barely a pound to his name, on the other side of the world from Australia, in a place where it never snowed and I'd never seen a frozen puddle.
Getting off the train, I was dead nervous. It was 9.30 pm - I was hours late. The chances of him being there were nil, I thought. We were strangers, after all, and we hadn't spoken since Christmas a week ago.
But there he was.
I will never forget him driving us all back to where they were squatting, sitting on a stranger's lap with more in the back, a rag tag bunch of humans. The car was plastered with surfing photos and none of the doors opened but the drivers side. How did I get myself into this situation?
But it was beautiful. We spent days cozied up in the truck, talking about our lives, our hopes, our dreams. We walked across frosty fields and drank whisky in centuries old pubs. We decided to get married and move to country England.
And I was leaving to go back home in a week, via Asia. Snow was forecast and I was desperate for a winter wonderland - I had dreamt of England in snow all my life and it struck me as a magical thing.
'I'll call it in for you', he said, kissing me. I went weak at the knees.
The night was bitterly cold. Until you've slept in a truck in Winter in England with a tiny wood burner crackling and popping and then going out at 2 am, you haven't lived. There was no way I was getting out of the covers until the fire was lit and tea was on - this had become our ritual over the last three days.
'Quick, get up!' he started saying, half whispering, half shouting. He's stark naked in a white Englishman beauty and I'm bleary eyed and still amazed how I ended up here. He's looking out the tiny window above the bed and beckoning to me.
'I told you I'd call it in!' he said, like a god or an elf or a green man of the woods, in touch with the natural world in which his truck was nestled.
And there it was, quietly fuzzing down from the dark morning sky, covering the trucks with white. I threw my wellies, coat and hat on so fast it wasn't funny. Except that they're his coat, and his wellies, because I'm Australian and terribly unprepared for snow. These photos are him barely awake and me delightfully dancing about saying 'it's snowing, it's snowing', like I'm five and have never seen anything so darn marvellous in all my days. I'm drunk with love and possibility and the beauty of the world.
I'll never forget that morning - his dog on my sneakered feet, warming their numbness, the kettle steaming the windows, the croissant warmed on the woodburner, the wonder of snow and love.
In an age where mobile phones were yet to take photos, these two are the only ones I have from that week. They send me immediately there - the smell of red wine and love, roll ups, firesmoke.
I had to leave the next day, off to Paris, or so I thought. But it was snowing so hard in France the flight was cancelled, so back I went to Brighton, and the gift of snow.
This post was written for 
With Love,
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