Grant and I dated for 9 months before we got engaged, but we had known we wanted to get married about a month after we met. However, we kept that detail to ourselves for the most part, until my mom came to visit while I was working as a camp counselor over the summer of 2019.
I had a day off from work and she came to visit because I was homesick and was having a hard time being away from Grant. (He was in Washington D.C. and cell service in the mountains isn’t so great!) While she was there we talked about how Grant and I wanted to get married, which didn’t come as much of a surprise to her. We had so much fun talking about all the planning and exciting things to come, but I reassured her that it probably wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. I was thinking sometime in December or January, at the earliest.
Little did I know…
The summer had come to an end and I had just moved into my sorority house to begin my senior year. Grant and I had been planning our back to school date since the beginning of the summer and we were both looking forward to it.
That afternoon my mom called me as I was getting ready and asked what I was wearing and told me to have fun. It seemed a bit suspicious at the time, but I didn’t really think much of it.
Grant told me our reservation was at 6:30 and he would pick me up at 6. Again, not unusual because Grant is very prompt and he made me think that we were going to a restaurant that was 20 mins away.
He picked me up and started driving to The Square (Oxford’s downtown) which is not where the restaurant I thought he was taking me to was…
At this point I was honestly getting a little frustrated with him. He wasn’t answering my questions and for a guy who normally has everything planned to the minute, there didn’t seem like there was much of a plan.
Since we were so “early” for our dinner reservation Grant said he wanted to go in to Square Books, which is a little bookstore in Oxford (keep in mind I had never been in the store until that night, so it held no sentimental value for us at all). It seemed very odd to be shopping for a book before a dinner date, but I went along with it.
As we wandered around aimlessly, my frustration with Grant grew. He convinced me to go upstairs to look for this “mystery book” he was trying to find. Then he oddly asked if I wanted to go out on the balcony of the store.
As we walked through the door I saw a table set up with flowers and a wrapped gift. Grant casually said it was a back to school gift, which I believed, but thought it was a bit extravagant.
The wrapped gift ended up being a handmade scrapbook with pictures of us and sweet captions that said things like “will you travel the world with me,” “will you laugh with me,” “will you start a family with me” and on the last page it said “will you marry me?”
As you can guess, I was very surprised. I had no idea when I woke up that day that I would be getting engaged… I didn’t even have my nails done!
Grant later told me that he had been so wrapped up in looking at the pictures in the scrapbook that he forgot to get on his knee at the time I got to the last page! LOL.
At that point everything was a blur, quite literally, because tears of happiness were streaming down my face.
As Grant stood up and helped me put the ring on my finger, I started to hear the clicking of a camera and looked over to find my roommate and another close friend taking pictures of the whole thing. I ran over to them and we hugged and laughed and cried.
We called my parents and texted some close friends and then turned off our phones and walked to dinner at City Grocery right down the street. Neither of us remember what we ate but it was the greatest meal ever.
Thanks for reading!
