February fourth. Best day of the year.

Arthur's Seat. Kinda looks like a camel, doesn't it?

Tomorrow’s our anniversary. Not our wedding anniversary, or the anniversary of our engagement, but the day we became a couple. Eleven years ago, I met him on a hike to the top of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh. We were both studying abroad on the edge of the North Sea in Scotland.

My husband fit the image of an Irishman, intense and enigmatic. He was infamous for being opinionated and funny. I thought he seemed too smart, too confident for twenty-two. A tormented writer, he claimed his work turned to crap the instant it hit the paper. You got the sense that he would be very famous, although his disposition suggested his fame might arrive posthumously.

The second week of school, we went sightseeing. We walked down the wide Georgian streets of New-Town and up the hill to the famous kirkyard overlooking the castle. The granite buildings seemed relaxed with their plumbing hanging out their backsides. At the National Museum we sat by the pools of carp under the nineteenth century glass arcade. In the mediaeval cathedral, a small, old man approached and asked where we were from. When we told him we were from New York the man showed us a plaque donated by a New Yorker. I watched my husband listening patiently and realized how proud I'd be if we were a couple.

The next week, my husband helped me buy a bike and I lent him the use of my laptop. We spent a week of evenings together. We sat up drinking and I’d play with his feet. One night I had a dream we were married. Finally, on February fourth, I kissed him. The first time, it was the way you kiss a corpse, softly, slowly, and on the forehead. I thought, if I marry this man, and spend the rest of my life with him, I might kiss him for the last time in the same way.

For our first weekend trip we went to Glasgow. We both had grandparents born there. My grandfather had been a steam-hammer man and his had owned a brass works. I’d read about how dire the tenements had been. I remembered the tintype pictures of blackened oval staircases hanging from ship's steel and rust. The narrow closes filled with washing hung from every window and the buildings coated with coal dust, too heavy for the ocean gales to blow away. The tenements had been torn down but we saw the rows of warehouses and "to let" signs. The streets led to no great cities, only thousands more granite houses with walled gardens and sodium lamps that paced out, up to the tops of the hills.

Back in Edinburgh, we liked to walk through the residential streets by our dorm. The tiny stone houses squeezed into plots of land that could be more than a sixteenth of an acre. Hand in hand, we analyzed the gardens, talked to dogs, and described what sort of house we'd like to live in. We paused at one window, looking at a room filled with bookcases and plants and deep red walls. The street signs were bolted into the granite walls.

One night, we found ourselves back at Arthur's Seat, sitting in the tall scrub. It was June, but cool, and he put his jacket around me. He told me about his family as we watched the castle lights. We were so far north that the sky never really got dark. It always stayed a deep indigo blue.

We spent Sundays in bed that year, watching the slanting sun while we fooled around. I knew that I'd remember these days when I was old and know that this was what it felt like to be twenty-one. I lived abroad and fell deeply in love with a very kind and interesting man.