Happy anniversary to my sweetheart

Nine years ago on this day I met a geeky guy named Wessel at the Delta baggage carousel at Logan Airport. I’d briefly chatted with his friend, Frans, on my flight from Tampa to Boston. Frans was visiting from his home in the Netherlands. Wessel had moved from there to Boston for work a few months earlier. Frans mentioned a crazy ice-skating trip they’d planned to take — driving five hours to Lake George in New York just for a skate, then five hours home. Crazy, I thought, and so I asked them if I could write up the trip in my then Boston Globe travel column, “Where they Went.” They were game.

Meanwhile, it turned out the Wessel had parked his car at the subway stop near my house and they were going to take the “T” there from the airport.

I called my friend Kristin, who was kind enough to pick me up at the airport on that Valentine’s Day in 2003.

“Kristin,” I said, calling her on my cell from the noisy baggage area. “I know this sounds crazy, but I just met these two really nice Dutch men, and can we give them a ride to the Quincy T stop?”

“Rich men?” she shouted.

“No, DUTCH men!” I said, laughing so hard I could barely speak.

We all climbed into her VW Golf and chatted animatedly on the 15-minute drive to the T. When they left, I joked to Kristin, “There goes my new boyfriend.”

Wessel called the next week and I interviewed him for the story. And then another story began to unfold … the one of us. We fell in love, we moved to North Carolina for his work, we married (Oct. 30, 2004) and we survived his gender change. Now we’re Diane and Lina, and we’re so grateful to have met and opened our hearts and lives to one another.

Love you, hon!!

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