Pepe's Tree in Spring [Pepe's Garden, Capitol Hill, Seattle] Diana F+

20) I initially (briefly) met my eventual husband, Jon, at a sailboat regatta in Cleveland in 1995. His version of the story is that he saw me come in off the water from racing one day. I was wearing a shorty wetsuit with a bikini under it. When I pulled the top of the wetsuit down, he saw the bruises that were covering my arms and hips (Thistles are rather violent boats to sail), and said to his friend "That's the kind of girl I'm going to marry!" We met again in 1997 at another regatta, this time in San Diego, which was the beginning of a whirlwind 8-month courtship. He came to Seattle for the summer, then I moved to Phoenix (his hometown) for 9 months, then we sold his house in Phoenix, bought a beautiful 42-foot sailboat to live on, moved back to Washington, and got married in 1998.

21) It turns out that two-year-crushes from afar aren't actually a very good foundation for a marriage, and although we seemed like a good match on paper, Jon and I spent our entire two-year marriage in counseling, trying to get along while living in a space of 42 X 12 feet at its largest, and eventually divorced in 2000. I have not heard from him since the day of our divorce. That seems kind of weird, but I had done so much processing of it before it actually happened, that I was really ready to move on by the time it ended.

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