Love my country boy

As a teenager, I didn’t have enough dating experience to have a “type,” but I usually figured I’d end up with a clean-cut preppy guy like the ones I went to school with. The kind that wore a lot of polo shirts and spent summers relaxing by the pool.

Luckily, this was just a vague picture in my head and not a rigid requirement. If it had been, I would have missed out on the jackpot-winning lottery ticket that is my husband.

Matt and I were introduced through friends at K-State. I soon learned that relaxing during the summer was a foreign concept to him, since that was the peak season for his family’s vegetable farm, and his rusty, thundering old pickup would have raised some eyebrows in my high-school parking lot. In fact, I'm pretty sure Trace Adkins wrote that song “Ladies Love Country Boys" about us: city girl goes to college, meets “a wild-eyed boy with a farmer’s tan” and goes “riding in the middle of his pickup truck.” Check and check.

This camping, hunting, goatee’d guy was not the type I’d pictured falling for -- and, as he later told me, he hadn’t seen himself with “a sorority girl,” either. But we made each other laugh and loved being together.

That was in December 1998. Since then, we’ve moved to Texas and back, gotten pets, gotten married, bought two houses, had a baby, laughed, cried and driven each other crazy.

I could do an entire post of stories and examples of how great he is, and probably will someday. But for now, I'll just say that after 12 years, I still wouldn't trade my sweet, smart, selfless and scruffy guy for anything.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that he looks damn good in a polo.