Thank you all for such a warm welcome to aNewscafe.com! Some of you asked how I came to be in a small, remote fishing village in the Highlands of Scotland, so I’ll tell you! I promise that after this I’ll go back to stories about life in this wee village.
Really, it’s one of those things that’s probably becoming more common these days: Love By Blog. My now-husband and I both had blogs on the same site, and by some random alignment of stars we ended up with one mutual friend, out of thousands of bloggers. I’d noticed his comments on her entries, and was immediately intrigued. I was also, however, realistic… For starters, we were both in relationships, plus he lived in Scotland and I was in Pennsylvania. I had to consider him “my online friend,” and nothing more. Well okay…. I did feel ‘more’ but I knew it was impossible. My relationship wasn’t great but I assumed his was fine, and so for a couple of years we were friends without the possibility of anything deeper (little did I know). But then our lives changed at about the same time. I ended my relationship (doomed for quite some time), and I got used to the idea that mine was likely to be a solitary life. Meanwhile in Scotland, his relationship (similarly long-doomed, unbeknownst to me) ended as well and he, too, settled in to a life on his own.
One crisp October day I discovered one of those phone numbers that would let me call most places in the world for pennies per minute. I wrote in my blog, “Anyone want a phone call?” It was a question aimed solely at him despite being oh-so-casually general, and to my delight he answered, “I would!” Soon we had our first phone call, and that was it, for me; I was hooked. By then, our poor long-suffering online friends were regularly howling ‘get a room!’ when we got flirtatious in comments to each other’s posts, and we’d been emailing quite a lot each day as well. While I had little idea what he looked like, I knew his heart, and before too many months had gone by he was planning a trip to America to see me. I often thought, “this is crazy!” but equally, “this is going to happen, isn’t it?” and soon I was breaking it to my mother that a guy I met on the internet was coming to visit for two weeks and that yes, he was going to be staying in my apartment. I was never worried that he would turn out to be some creeper armed with a bag of tools and a ‘bottle of perfume’ for me to sniff. Instead, I worried about being a disappointment to him – I’m not the prettiest flower in the garden, and I am basically round – but as it turned out, Sem knew my heart, too, and that’s what mattered.
It was a fine spring day when Sem came strolling down the International Arrivals corridor at the airport. I’d gotten there early, excited and nervous because we were facing two weeks of constant time together… and how on earth would that be? We’d spent countless hours on the phone, on Skype, and writing emails and private blog posts to each other for the better part of a year but this was real-life, now. What would happen?
What happened was that he spotted me first – and he didn’t turn around immediately to catch the next flight home (whew)! Instead, I saw him leaning around people to catch sight of me waiting impatiently behind the barrier – and I most certainly did not want him to go in any direction other than towards me! My heart thumped a bit and then he was there. Hugging him was as natural as breathing, and he looked as happy to see me as I was to see him. On the train home we sat close, holding hands, hardly believing we were together at last. I can still feel the heat of the day and the warmth of Sem’s leg against mine as the train clacked and clattered along the tracks towards home. The strange feeling of familiarity with someone I’d never actually met was offset by my certainty that this was the right thing – us, together. I was pretty sure he felt the same way.
The drive from the train station to my apartment was short, and soon we were home. What next, I wondered. I closed the door behind us and when I turned, Sem was down on one knee. “Marry me,” he said, taking my hands in his… and, saying yes, my life changed forever in every good way.
Deb Segelitz was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and is astounded to find herself living in the Scottish Highlands. Equally surprising to her is that she now has a small business restoring and selling old fountain pens. These two facts have convinced Deb that life is either beautifully random, or filled with destiny created by someone with a sense of humor. She hopes the fine north state residents will accept her as an honorary member, since she has some cousins in California who she visited once, but even more importantly because the north state folks she actually knows are fabulous people, who are also the reason for her presence here on anewscafe.com. An enthusiastic amateur photographer, Deb is grateful that she lives in a place that’s about as point-and-shoot as it gets. Her tortoiseshell cat, Smartie, rates her as an average minion, too slow with the door-opening but not too bad on the food-dish-refilling, and her husband hasn’t had her deported back to the States yet, so things must be going all right there, as well.
