“The boys said they were searching for frogs the other day.”

I could hardly hear him over the water feature we sat table side of. Even with his words muffled by splashing, I could gather the excitement in his eyes. This was good date night conversation, which can be hard to come by, nearly nine years into marriage.

“In a moment I was ten again,” his eyes shone with the memory as he replayed it to me, “at Spider lake, mud up to my knees searching for frogs with my friends.”

I could see it because he had taken me there. A decade before, with a ring not yet on my finger, he had walked me through that forest next to the lake he grew up on and showed me the exact place he used to net frogs. But here, ten years later, four children asleep at home, I heard the tale anew, and now in light of how it was playing out in the childhood of our own kids.

It seems that with the passing of years after those vows are spoken, conversation can dry out. A long-awaited evening away can feel scratchy and awkward, words and stories and dialogue other than work and kids is grasped at between bites of chips and salsa. We feel rusty. But this evening next to that fountain was different. The same as always, we came tired. But I had determined ahead of time to ask some questions.

“What is one of your favorite memories with your dad?”

“What about your mom?”

“What do you think fondly of when you look back on growing up at camp?”

I wanted to barge into his memories. This man that nine years ago this summer I swore to always cherish, I wanted to cherish now the part of him I never knew.

I know the dad him. The business owner him. I know the newly married him to the tired and taxed him. I wanted to know those twenty-three years of him I never knew.

He looks at me and sees the mother Eryn. Writer Eryn. Awkward newly married Eryn to worn-out and hormonal post-partum Eryn. But there is much that he has to learn about the Eryn I was for seventeen years before we met.

Last summer he drove us way back into the mountains. What began as a quick trip to grab coffee didn’t find us back at home until ten hours later. Halfway through our adventure, he asked if I wanted to turn down a dirt road and see the camp where he worked in high school, this one 1,400 miles from the one he grew up at. A whole different world of his I had yet to step in to.

“We don’t have to, it’s kind of out of the way.” He told me, looking straight ahead. But we did have to. I wanted to see this world that had shaped him into the man I married.

We drove slowly through those woods, red dirt road framed by aspen and pine, and the scenes played out in my mind as he narrated his history. I saw him lounging on the deck of that now vacant log cabin. I pictured him up in the ropes tower flirting with a girl working alongside him for the summer. I could smell the ash in my nose as he told me of the forest fire that met him on his first day at camp. “’Better not unpack your bags, we might have to evacuate’, the camp leader told me.” He smiled at the memory. I smiled too, at this man I was just getting to know.

Of course, sometimes entering into unknown places is dangerous. It’s not always easy to lean in. A glow in the eye over a sweet memory can quickly open the door to a not-so-fond one, that perhaps has been hidden behind doors for many years. For some couples, asking to be invited into the memories of a husband or wife can lead to feeble ground. But if we never step in, then there remain pieces of our spouse we don’t know.

When we enter in, we come to know them in a whole new light; yes, at times a hard light, but nonetheless, we come to know our spouse anew. We meet them ten years ago, before we had the chance. And sometimes we are the exact person they need to enter into that place beside them, even if a decade later. We can slip our hand into theirs, filling the gap in their palm after many hard years. Shadows can become displaced over hard spaces when we unpack memories beside our spouse.

There are twenty-three years of my husband that I never knew. Nine years have elapsed since we slipped bands of gold over each others’ fingers, so I imagine I still have many memories to unpack. I still have so much to learn about this man I thought I knew. That’s why we’ll keep showing up at the dinner table, budget-thin and plenty tired, searching for words after nine years of many but not enough. We’ll keep asking the questions that string one memory from the next until we find ourselves again at that alter, knowing one another in a whole new light.