The dating scene for thirty-something-year-olds in 2023, oh God. The tinder-philes weren’t very warm and tender. Bumble? More of a fumble. Hinge was where you would go to binge DMs—it was all very cringe. Each app swung a three-fingered claw over cute heartthrobs, overgrown toddlers and debonair pitstains.

One of them, eHarmony, that algorithm worked at least once in January that year.

If you were to ask him, it was the science teacher’s selfie with a Muppet that won the game. If you were to ask her, it was the sexy pinup pose atop a sawdust-laden cast-iron tablesaw. Really, it was the synchronicity of two teachers’ calendars scheduled off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Gotta love that guy.

Sarah and Jonathan first agreed to get coffee in Williamsburg that fateful federal holiday. As they stirred their coffee spoons, sifting through the inevitable collective trauma-dumping that happens anytime two teachers gather outside of school, Jonathan and Sarah discovered something about each other promising there was going to be a second date.

Spoon theory allows chronically disabled individuals to relate to the rest of the world in spite of their physical or cognitive challenges. The idea is that able-bodied people seem to have an endless supply of spoons to get through the day, while the “spoonies” are the chronically disabled people who might only have a handful of spoons to get through the day. Sarah has been blessed with an autoimmune condition where her body believes her organs are foreign invaders and must be vanquished in mortal combat. Jonathan won the genetic lottery with a hyper-rare condition that makes energy production significantly slower and results in severe full-body pain whenever he stands for more than 20 minutes on any given day.

The two of them, they understood what it was like for the other.

It’s a strange thing when teachers start to flirt. Valentine’s day was around the corner, and flirting was in the lesson plans.

Jonathan planned to send flowers to Sarah in her classroom, but he, being a woodworker and a woodshop teacher, he set out to make them himself out of wood. Because teachers flirt by helping each other grade papers or texting each other blurbs from their students, Jonathan invited his 120 students to help him make the most beautiful wooden flower bouquet ever to pass a school secretary’s desk.

“I’m gonna steal your girl, Mr. E.” said a high-school junior, her fingertips caked in superglue as she coiled the delicate curls of silver maple into a beautiful and lifelike rose, prettier than what Jonathan’s two decades making sawdust had yielded so far in the bouquet.

Meanwhile, Sarah had begun teasing her fifth-graders that she might have a boyfriend for Valentine’s day. “If he loved you Ms. Jones, he would send you a bunch of Starbucks gift cards,” said one child as her school secretary walked in carrying the surprise package.

“I have to meet him, Ms. Jones,” said another boy, the profound impact of two-and-a-half feet of wooden romance resonating in his tone.

The first date Sarah and Jonathan went on where they had to dress all fancy and take a shower for, they went to see Hamilton in Norfolk. It was a great moment together, but the auditorium of Chrysler Hall in Norfolk was not where they fell in love.

The room where it happened was her dad’s living room when a future family member experienced a catastrophic health scare and the woodworker in the wheelchair saved the day, building the platforms and ramps they would need for recovery to happen. His spoons didn’t matter to him, all he wanted was to love on Sarah and her family well, and this was what they needed.

At that time, Sarah regulated her medical condition with a weekly self-administered shot to deactivate her immune system and Jonathan learned very quickly the only way he could see Sarah’s cute button nose consistently at the end of the week was if he made the hour-and-eleven-minute drive from Richmond to Yorktown himself. His first trek down there killed his favorite car he ever drove, a turbo-charged Subaru. This was the trigger for all the nostalgia and teasing that would come to define much of their jokes with each other.

Their second fancy date was to see Les Miserables at the Altria theater for Sarah’s birthday. Their collective ADHD looked at the tickets; saw doors closed at 1:00 pm; and concluded 2:00 pm was when they should arrive. Thankfully, the theater staff were gracious and guided them to some available chairs in the back before intermission. Sarah’s favorite line from this musical comes from a song near the end of the musical. The line she loves is “to love another person is to see the face of God.”

Sarah was having a spiritual experience for the next few months—praise Jesus, hallelujah!

Spring break happened and believe it or not, teachers get the week off too. It’s not just for prepubescent bean sprouts and pimply sprouted-ups.

Jonathan got to run the gauntlet of meeting Sarah’s friends at a cabin in the mountains of Virginia. His new turbo-less Subaru whined and chugged up the mountainside; Jonathan grumbled about the lack of acceleration at higher altitudes from that humble 2.5L engine but he made it. (Barely.)

They spent several days playing board games, Jonathan, Sarah, and Sarah’s closest friends. Sarah felt safe in spite of Jonathan’s fierce competitiveness, abundance of sass, and lumbering puppydog personality. (Picture a big dog puppy who hasn’t yet gained control over their limbs yet. That’s Jonathan’s vibe on the daily.)

While Sarah felt safer and safer at the cabin over spring break, Jonathan felt stung by something, well, a few somethings. Many of them. A bunch of tiny stinging things. Some of them were black, others were colorful. All of them had angry butts and loud wings. Jonathan swears some of them had yellow jackets on, but Sarah doesn’t remember it that way. But, she wasn’t the one sleeping on the side of the bed that had their nest in it. Nor was she underneath the window containing still more nests.

Fun fact: not much scares Jonathan, but the one thing that will always give him the heebie-jeebies is a wasp/hornet/multi-shot demon honeybee on a meth-head diet. When he was a teenager and one would find its way into his space, he would go to extreme lengths to unalive it. Think can of hairspray and a zippo. Voilà, the warfare Jonathan waged against his mortal foe.

And yet, Sarah was worth sticking around for.

In the summer of 2023, Sarah took Jonathan to her family farm in Arkansas. It’s beautiful out there and Sarah couldn’t wait to introduce him to her fairy-tale land of rolling hills and big sky country. Jonathan went gallivanting with Sarah’s adorable nieces, aged 5 and 10.

The younger blonde-haired girl took some warming up to before she accepted Jonathan as cool enough for her aunt. Each night, Sarah posed the question to her nieces, “So, what do ya think? Can I keep him?” The older niece pretty much accepted him after two hours. The younger niece spent the week undecided.

During that first visit, the nieces brought Jonathan into an old industrial chicken coop on the property. The building’s been used as a shed for more than 40 years, judging by the license plate on the striped Chevy pickup parked left of center. It’s the kind of place where in broad daylight, you need a flashlight and a walking stick to get to the steamer trunk hiding the forgotten treasure for which the Pawn Stars would slap down a Benjamin. This was the backdrop where Sarah’s youngest niece made it clear exactly what she was capable of.

“Jonathan, what do you think we should do if we find a dead body in here?” asked that sweet little girl.

“I don’t know Georgia, what do you think we should do?”

“I think we should bury it and not tell anybody.”

The cackling from that kiddo made Jonathan sleep less soundly that night.

(On the last day of their trip, Georgia acquiesced, but only after living the joy of Jonathan reading a book to her—it’s one of his hidden talents. “What do you think Georgia? Can I keep him?” asked Sarah. “Mmmm. Neee-yeah, I guess so, you can keep him.”)

Sarah eventually moved from Yorktown to be near Jonathan in Richmond. It was then some dreadful discoveries came to the surface. Once, Sarah lounged barefoot on Jonathan’s sofa (scandalous!) and his roommate spotted her tiny toes.

The poor guy probably needs therapy now. He’d never seen such tiny nubbins pass as pedal appendages.

Sarah’s roommate also discovered a scary reality of what doing life with the singing science teacher would be like. Sarah had a drinking problem—but it wasn’t booze. It was coffee mugs. Hundreds of them, millions probably. And those were just the ones that had been unpacked into the kitchen, their numbers easily overtaking entire cabinets.

That was okay though.

Anyone who knows Jonathan knows he has an entire bedroom in his house dedicated to storing his wood. And yet, “the wood room” is not the only room with wood stored in it. Every room in his house has wood tucked away somewhere.

October came, and with it came Sarah’s dad’s wedding. At the end of the reception, the single women huddled together to catch the bouquet, and despite a heck of a struggle from Sarah’s youngest niece, Sarah managed to catch the bouquet.

Next came the awkward garter belt toss.

Sarah’s dad took the garter belt and stuffed it into Jonathan’s hand, no toss in the air. It was her dad saying loud and clear, that Jonathan had his blessing to marry his daughter.

By that point, Jonathan had pretty much decided Sarah was safe and good and fun to be around. Sarah was beginning to dream about the possibilities, spending most of her free time nesting at Jonathan’s house for the day when she would move in with him.

Anyone who knows Jonathan would not be surprised to hear he endeavored to make Sarah’s ring himself. After his best friend sold him an aquamarine she’d had from an acquaintance who had gotten it on a military tour, Jonathan set about making the ring. The ring would be made out of wood (because, y’know, Jonathan) but the stone was to be set in gold and inlaid into the wooden ring. He’d considered setting the stone within the wood itself, but for durability and shininess, he concluded a gold inlay was best.

As such, preparations began on how you, their beloved invitee, came to be reading this fanciful tale. Jonathan rolled and glued Sarah’s ring out of one of the same woods he had made her Valentine’s Day bouquet from just ten months earlier. His partnership with a local jeweler encountered some delays but Jonathan had already worked out the logistics of proposing, so there was no going back without costly delays and incalculable missed opportunities. Thus, Sarah was to get two rings; he would make her a placeholder ring to propose with, while he continued working on the aptly-named “stoner ring.”

It turns out the process of custom-making a wooden wedding ring to a specific person’s specific finger size requires a very specific model to be used—namely the person on whose finger said ring will live. Yet, Jonathan was not going to let Sarah glimpse his progress on the ring or the direction he was going with it. Much of November and the early parts of December were spent blindfolding Sarah with towels/neckties/and paper bags for test-fittings. To maintain proximity, he built an assortment of rings behind crudely-erected barriers made out of laundry baskets, Amazon boxes, and dirty coffee mugs. He even had six decoy rings in the works just in case Sarah saw any of what was happening.

December 17th, 2023 they had tickets to go see How The Grinch Stole Christmas: the Musical at the Altria theater. For some reason, Sarah had forgotten her winter coat at her house and so Jonathan had insisted she wear his. Unbeknownst to her, in the pen pocket on the left arm of his coat, the placeholder ring was ready to be placed on her finger. It was made out of a blue-green wood with hues ranging from teal to kelp green; Jonathan chose to make the placeholder ring out of that wood because it was reminiscent of the Grinch’s fur and he wanted it to be special for his favorite person.

In the lobby before the show, Sarah had just bought a carton of popcorn from the concessions stand. Crowds were gathering, but the volume was still low enough for Jonathan to be heard.

“There’s a ring in the pocket of that coat,” he said, tapping her arm where the pocket was.

“Oh? There’s a pocket?” she asked absentmindedly “Where’s the pocket? Which pocket?”.

“The ring is for you,” he continued, noting the corners of Sarah’s eyes were starting to glisten.

“…so many pockets…oh?” her words were starting to garble as the curiosity and realization began to dawn on her.

“There’s a question associated with that ring,” he remarked, watching her eyes to see that she was following. He would savor this moment for the rest of his life, the moment when he got to ask Sarah to be a part of the rest of his life.

Sarah’s ability to speak English had ceased.

“Do you know the question?” Jonathan asked, massaging some warmth into her cool fingers.

Sarah’s head nodded up and down so fast Jonathan was concerned she might get whiplash. He’d seen that movement on paint-can-shakers and he knew what kind of a slurry they could do.

“Are you ready for the question?” Jonathan kissed Sarah’s hand.

The sound she let out was some sort of blubbering snort; her head was still spasming up and down. “Yes,” she chirped in a tone far above a normal treble clef range.

Jonathan pulled the ring out of the coat pocket and slid it over her finger, “How’s the popcorn?”

Astute readers will note Jonathan technically didn’t ask her to marry him. Don’t be alarmed. This was a fact that was rectified two months later on Valentine’s Day when Sarah was out sick with bronchitis. The plan had been for Jonathan to barge into her classroom on bended knee to repeat the previous year’s theatrics for her student population but with her burrito-ed

on the couch at home, it became a more intimate affair. He flung open the door, dropped to his knees and hobbled to her to plant the completed stoner ring made out of four different woods onto her beautiful finger.

At the end of the 2023-2024 school year, Sarah moved into Jonathan’s house. Almost immediately, they adopted two kittens and made room for Sarah’s punk of a bunny. Jonathan had never owned cats before, so Sarah delighted in the process of him becoming a cat daddy. They took a second trip to the farm, hung out more with the extended family, and every day they’re actively choosing to love each other more.

It’s all really quite mushy, the story of the woodworker jonesing after the science teacher named Jones. It’s the sort of story that makes peoples’ cheeks hurt and their tear ducts overactive. Don’t worry though. Sawdust soaks up moisture, and Jonathan leaves a trail of it in his wake.

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