It's been one year since Karen Woods rocked my world before the 8:30 service with her cold, unfeeling declaration: "They found Lyle Hatfield dead in his bed this morning." And that was it.

One year has passed. A year of mourning, remembering, life changes, pregnancies, and engagements. But over all, I've tried to be thankful for the time that I spent with Lyle, even more than grieved at his loss. Tonight I'm remembering some things.

• The 30 hour famine. Many of these will be from that night. Standing in between him and Jacob, trying to sing- it was impossible, their tone-deaf strains drowning out everything nice.
• The service project we did at the Crisis Pregnancy Center in Lewisville. we were going through tons of old clothes, and he tried on a little girls's halloween witch costume with a matching handbag. Then his pants sagged down, and Maggie told him to pull them up, at which point he promptly dragged them lower. But my moment was when we were sitting on the floor going through baby clothes, and he found this little royal blue bootie, that said "baby of the year" on the top. We couldn't find the mate, and he liked it, so he tied it around my wrist.
• Then we watched the goonies at some point, and he told me to lick a big red wrapper and stick it to my forehead. He said that nothing would happen. He lied- it burned.
• We passed notes ridiculously in Mr. Adair's class. He had to have known it, but he never said a word. We'd hide the notes in Bibles, we even used a sponge once, and passed them back and forth. we thought we were so covert about it.
• After a few years, we started sitting on the floor in Mr. Adair's class sometimes, and we'd just lean over and fall asleep on each other. And still, Mr. Adair never said anything. I still sort of wonder why.
• We went to Silver Cliff together one year, and we were always, always sneaking out of the big lame night activity, whatever it was, to go take a walk and talk about life. I remember once we were talking about art classes and auto tech classes over by Hortense, and Mr. Owen interrupted us. That was awkward.
• There was this one retreat... Maggie cuold tell you, it was great. One of the best. I really, really, really liked Lyle at this point, and the whole way up he kept making me listen to metallica, and I hated it. I wanted to listen to Metallica Symphony, but he'd never let me.
• Then there was one day when we all went and played some sort of tag game on a peninsula at the lake. haha. I had been keeping a sort of journal of the weekend on a piece of notebook paper, and he knew it, and he wanted to see it. But that afternoon, I had it safely tucked away in my back pocket, thinking that it would ba totally safe there. There was no way he'd reach in there and get it. But then, somehow, we were running around, and he nudged it out with a football.... I'm guessing it had peeked out a little by then. I think someone took it before he could read it- I don't remember any humiliation that would've accompanied that.
• The first night of that retreat, we played a giant capture the flag game on the park's golf course- it was Texas v. Oklahoma. I had flip flops on, and was not going to play out there, at night, in the wet grass- I was going to die or something, for sure. But Lyle was so adamant about my playing, that he offered to switch shoes with me if I'd play. It was such a cute/likeable gesture to me at the time, I'm pretty sure I obliged.

I know that these memories are small, and really ridiculous and juvenile, but that's what we were. Ridiculous and Juvenile. Oh, but we thought we were awesome. These are just sort of snapshots I have in my mind that represent our relationship- a close friendship, obviously, but something slightly beyond for quite some time. We had something special, and I'm grateful that we realized it while we had it.

Tomorrow and Monday will be hard, but I'll live. He didn't, and that gives me even more motivation to live, for him, in some small way.