Tree Marie WoodSmith
Our Love Story
We met at our dear friends wedding in Northern California. Some how over the years we had never met. It was one of those magical moments, where sparks fly and you want to be with the other all the time. I lived in Ca and him on Portland so over a few months he courted me. It was beautiful. And then I happily moved to Portland to start our new life. We work and play together. We are best friends and forever lovers.
We designed the ring together after we came home from Italy. With the sunstone and gold from his mom’s ring we met with our jeweler and created something that fit Tree’s personality and love for heirloom. What I love the most is that it looks almost like an ancient ring, but also has a vintage feel to it. The pattern was inspired from Etruscan designs.
At the wedding we added to other rings to the stack. My great grandmothers weddings rings. The diamonds are hand cut and from the late 1800’s. What I wear on my finger is very meaningful and I stare at them everyday!
The Proposal
JOS: “So, I had been planning this proposal for a long time, many strategies and hidden ideas from Tree. My best friend Danny (who’s wedding we met at) and I carefully planned a way for me to propose to Tree on a private beach in Italy. Danny happened to be going to Italy with his wife Zoe at a slow food conference the same set of days we were to be in Italy! Danny offered to sneak into our room in our village while Tree and I were on a hike going the opposite direction. He grabbed my big camera, snuck back on the train and went to his village. This was a huge feat (Danny was recovering from a broken leg!!!) and since international text messaging failed between our phones. Our backup plan was for me to scatter notes around the village in order for me to communicate to Danny about where our room was in the village (you can’t pre-book these kinds of rooms). I scattered 7 scribbled notes all over the center square, including one translated in Italian (this was a huge task hiding my note writing from Tree), hoping he would find directions to our room and be able to retrieve the camera as planned. With the camera, he and his wife climbed down cliffs to get to a private beach where they setup a special private picnic lunch on a rock out in the ocean. RISERVATO… was the sign posted on the rock with a beautiful cloth, champagne bottle, chocolates, fruit, olives, bread, cheese, love notes, and much more. SO…. Tree and I came back to our village, went to our room as Tree wanted to get a coat, which made me very nervous because I thought Danny might be in the room, but when we arrived in the room he was not there. And… the camera was gone!!! So at that point I knew he got it. And I was on….. on for the spot light walk toward the other village. Danny and I planned to color coordinate the path with ribbon codes telling me where to turn: red meant right, green meant left, white meant forward. He and his wife Zoe, who was 7 months pregnant tagged a path all the way down a series of cliffs and shrubs and loose gravel wayyyy down to a private beach… I took Tree down this path and she hesitated… with a lot of resistance, but I persisted. She told me, “No, I can’t go down this path! I thought we were going to the other village for dinner? Then we went back up and I let her rest. I said, “Wait,…. I’ll go down and check it out, scope it. And turned around and left… I ran down this steep gnarly path 1500 yards until I finally found another color coded ribbon!!! I wasn’t sure if I was on the right path, but this confirmed I was. I then ran back up the cliff (thinking what am I going to do to convince her to come down here????) to Tree and said, “Hey… how are ya?” She said, “Does it get worse?” I said, “About the same, but it gets better and we can go slow…. You know Tree… I’ve prepared something very special for us down there and we HAVE to go. We can go slow and I will help you. However long it takes we can just take our time, the sun is beautifully setting and it will be something we can remember the rest of our lives.” She agreed. I said, “Think of this as a is a metaphor for our relationship….” and smiled… We went all the way down, then I lead her to the edge… where we looked out over the ocean. She saw the beach and also what appeared, from a distance, to be a pile of junk on a rock, but I looked closer because there was a bottle in the middle of what appeared to look like garbage. This was the rock in the ocean that we climbed out too…. and I very gradually started to share with Tree my thoughts and feelings…. just as the warm golden light of sun was setting over the ocean… Magic was in the aire…”