To My Husband:

Sometimes you meet a person and know they’ll be something important in your life. During our first conversation in 1990—when our new boss asked me to videotape everyone’s big life dream—you said yours was to run with the bulls in Pamplona. Those words put me off balance. What an amazing answer, I thought, because everyone else, including myself, had pinned their future happiness on monetary success—having a big house, an amazing career, expensive cars. Yours was the only experiential answer.

Your answer was about living.

From those words on I had a sense about you I can’t quite explain. You were unlike anyone I had ever met or been around. The more our friendship grew, the more I learned a different way of thinking, and the more intrigued I became. You profoundly changed me, brought out the good in me, and helped me find focus without all the B.S. You taught me integrity. How to do things right. How to be true to yourself and to the way you present yourself to the world. You taught me humility in the phrase, “I’m just a simple country girl,” and how down-playing yourself instead of falsely boosting, makes a bigger impression. I sometimes wonder if I would have found my success without your influence, or if I’d still be trying to be something I wasn’t nor would ever be.

While you may have lost your interest in running with the bulls in Pamplona, you have lived up to the dream of living in the true sense of the word. Life with you is an experience. And I love you for that. Always. Forever. Thank you for seeing past my wanna-be poser-ness when we met and for giving us the chance to create this life we have.

Thank you most of all for being you.

You are my best friend. My best love. My favorite person in the world. I vow to always remember this, to treat you as if you are my greatest treasure because you are. I value everything about our life together, what we’ve created, and what is yet to come. I think the next twenty-years are going to be even better than the first.