The Boy from the Farm

Tommy grew up in Rathdrum, Idaho, about an hour and a half south of Bonners Ferry, a kid shaped by wide-open land and honest work and a family that did things together. His parents built Twin Lakes Farm and Ranch from almost nothing, a business that started with a good deal on hay his dad didn’t need and grew into something remarkable through years of early mornings, dirty hands, and showing up every single day. What began with the whole family jumping off a suburban and throwing hay bales in the field eventually became semis, contracts, walk-in freezers, hundreds of head of cattle, and a farm store that people across the region come to because, as Tommy puts it, it’s just easy.

He grew up playing football and basketball at Lakeland High School. He grew up catching fish by hand in creeks, hunting, riding dirt bikes, chasing frogs in the dark. He grew up watching his parents work side by side, his mom throwing hay bales right alongside his dad, and somewhere in watching that, he formed a quiet but certain picture of what he wanted in a marriage. Not just someone beautiful. Not just someone kind. Someone who would not be afraid to get dirty. Someone who would show up next to him when times got hard.

After high school, Tommy allowed himself one summer of doing almost nothing. For the first time in his life, with football workouts and farm chores behind him, he took a few months to breathe. And then, in December of 2022, he left for the farthest mission in the entire Church. South Africa. If you found the point on earth directly opposite his house in Idaho and drilled straight through the planet, you would come out in the ocean right next to the southern tip of Africa. He went as far away as it was possible to go.

He served for two years. He learned pieces of five different languages in a country that has twelve official ones. He fell in love with the people, the culture, the music. He still listens to Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He still talks about going back. He cried when he left his mission leaders in those final months, South Africans he knew he would almost certainly never see again. He stood in the airport bathroom in Spokane on the day he came home and looked at himself in the mirror and thought, am I ready for this?

Something happened to Tommy on that mission that is hard to name and easy to feel when you talk to him. The people who knew him before say he was always good. But he came back different in a way that mattered. A more deliberate kind of love had taken root in him. The capacity of his heart had opened up. He had spent two years learning, at the deepest level, how to truly care about people. His whole mission was built around loving the Lord and loving the people around him. And when he came home, that did not go away. It just redirected.

He spent a few months back with his family in Florida, then stayed with a cousin in Utah, went on a lot of dates, felt nothing in particular, and came home to the farm. He sold four hundred pigs the week he returned. He started a beef business. He launched a hauling operation. He got busy. He was not looking.

The Girl from Bonners Ferry

Markynn grew up in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in a family that filled the room. Close-knit, loud in the best way, held together by the kind of gravitational pull that makes her say, if she’s been away at Tommy’s family’s place in Coeur d’Alene for more than two days, she starts aching to get home. Her dad is a man her whole family orbits around, a man whose blessing Tommy knew he needed before anything else could happen.

She was a basketball player. A good one. Good enough to go play collegiately at Snow College in Utah, a two-year school in a small town that felt, she says, like a bigger version of high school. She knew nobody when she arrived. She spent the first month largely alone, quiet in the way she can be around new people, waiting for the right connection. It came, eventually, in the form of teammates who became close friends, late-night sleepovers in twin beds, a girls’ trip to California with people she had only known for a week. She is the kind of person who, once she trusts you, is all in.

But basketball started feeling like a job. Practice every day. Weights at six in the morning. Games every weekend. She loved the sport but the love was changing shape, and she knew it. She did not go back for a second year. Instead she thought about a mission. She thought about cosmetology. She thought about school. She started filling out mission papers. She enrolled at BYU-Idaho in Rexburg for a semester.

She is not the kind of person who announces what she wants right away. She holds it close until she is sure. She describes herself as reserved around new people, not someone who says let’s hang out to a stranger. She has to feel it first. And for a long time, dating felt like it was going to require going somewhere far away, because the boys close to home felt like they came from a very small pool and the boys in Utah felt like they all had the same personality, pleasant but not particularly interesting. She was not desperate, not searching, just quietly aware that the right person was probably not in the usual places.

She had an app on her phone she almost never opened. Her sister Avery opened it for her.

The App, the Match & the Family Name

It was a summer evening in Bonners Ferry when Avery grabbed Markynn’s phone, opened the dating app Mutual, and set it to her location. Markynn was mortified. She had been embarrassed to have the app open in a small town where everyone would see her. But Avery had already done it. So Markynn started swiping.

She saw Tommy.

She thought he was so cute. She swiped up on him. They matched. It was one of the first matches she had ever gotten on the app. And being Markynn, she texted first.

He wrote back. And then, almost immediately, he asked the question that changed the whole shape of the conversation: “Random question, are you a Pluid?”

She froze. Her family name. How did he know? He told her he was a Pearson, that their families had been family friends years ago, that he remembered her house, her little brother Oakley running around in a diaper, her sister. She barely remembered it herself, it had been nearly a decade, but when she showed her mom the phone, her mom’s face said everything. Yeah, the Pearsons. We know them. What?

She showed Tommy to her mom and said, “I think we’re going to go on a date.” Her mom said, “What?” She said, “I know.”

The First Date

They texted for a while. He tried to invite her to pickleball nights at the farm with his friends and she said no because the idea of walking into a group of strangers when she barely knew him felt terrifying. Eventually he said, if you’re going to be in Coeur d’Alene, let’s just go on a date.

He had been at work all day and had hat hair under his cap. He ran his head under the faucet before she arrived. He also put on his Doc Martens, the ones with the thick soles, because her profile said she was five foot ten and he was six foot one and he had done the math and was mildly nervous about the arithmetic. He wanted to be sure.

They drove up into the mountains. He had clay pigeons in the back of the truck, and they shot guns as the sun started going down, and she was not a beginner. She hit some. She talked some smack when he missed a couple. They talked for hours. Her mom asked her later what they talked about and Markynn said she honestly could not remember because it was everything, just everything, and it never stopped flowing.

He did not kiss her that night. She drove home wondering if she had done something wrong, or if he was just the kind of person who waited.

He was just the kind of person who waited.

The Frog

The second date is the one that became legend. What is certain is that at some point, not long after the first date, they ended up by a lake at night with flashlights.

Tommy suggested catching frogs. He was always outside, always hunting or fishing or doing something that required getting muddy, and the idea of doing it on a date was not a performance. It was just who he was. Markynn said yes immediately.

They ran along the bank in the dark, flashlights jerking across the water, both of them in clothes not remotely suited for frog catching. The frogs were loud but invisible at first, the way frogs always are, and they chased sounds more than anything, laughing, shushing each other, missing. And then Markynn spotted one and just grabbed it. Without hesitating. Just snagged a frog right out of the dark.

Tommy says he had never seen a girl do that before. Just grab one.

Then she kissed it and threw it back.

That night, later, they lay on the trampoline at his family’s place and looked up at the stars and he kissed her for the first time. She drove home very late, past one in the morning, thinking he was something completely different than anything she had encountered before.

The Road Trip That Changed Everything

Tommy told her he was driving to Utah for a wedding and she had concert tickets in Oregon, and someone said, let’s just make a road trip out of it. They drove to Rexburg, slept at the sand dunes, made their way down to Utah, swung through Oregon, and came back up through the Tri-Cities. Seven days. Not as girlfriend and boyfriend. Just the two of them, all day every day, nowhere to go and nothing to do except be together.

Tommy said it was the road trip where he fell in love with her. Not a single moment. Just seven days of seeing who she was in every context, what she looked for on the horizon, how she laughed when something surprised her, whether he got tired of her. He did not get tired of her.

When they were driving through the Tri-Cities toward the end of the trip and he still had not asked her to be his girlfriend, she looked at him and said, so what’s holding you back? He went and bought flowers. She said she wanted more than a summer fling. And when they got home, they were official.

The Ring

They went ring shopping together in Rexburg, wandering through three different jewelry stores, trying things on, laughing a little at how wrong everything felt when it was on her hand instead of in her imagination. In the last store she tried something on and loved it. They went online and found two different styles they liked, took screenshots, brought them into Snapchat, and cut and pasted them together into the ring she actually wanted. He nodded. He made notes.

A few weeks later he picked her up outside class and gave her a hug and then pulled a crumpled receipt from his pocket. He said, I bought a ring. He had tried to hold it in and just could not. She says she felt like she got double engaged that day, once when he showed her the receipt and once when he actually proposed.

He teased her with it constantly after that. He would FaceTime her from the couch and just point the camera at the ring box, opening and closing it without saying a word while she made sounds of frustrated longing from three hours away. In Portland one night, around Christmas, they were walking on a little pier with the lights strung up and he grabbed her hand and started to drop to one knee and her heart sank straight through the floor and then he stood back up laughing and said just kidding. She was not amused.

Florida

Tommy’s family goes to Florida often. He had been there for several days before Markynn flew in. He knew exactly what he was going to do. His dad was the only other person on earth who knew.

The night before she arrived, he drove all the way up to Bonners Ferry, knocked on the Pluid door, had dinner with her family, sat with her dad, and asked for his daughter’s hand. Then he drove back home and packed and left for Florida. Markynn was at school when this happened. She had no idea.

She did her nails before the trip, just in case. She did her nails and then the day before the proposal, sitting on a boat in the water in the Florida sun, one of them popped off, and she asked him if she should just rip the rest off and he said no no it’s fine, and so she sat with one ruined nail feeling fine about it, and then later on the boat she ripped off every nail she had. All of them. Gone. She went and held up her bare hands in front of him that night and he looked at her like she had just lit something on fire.

The next day he told Markynn they were going on a date that evening to take pictures. She asked him, jean shorts or the white pants? He said the white pants.

She was running late. She is always running late. The sun does not wait. He loaded a blanket into his backpack and got on their electric bikes and she started chatting at full speed about everything and nothing, the way she does, and only later realized he had barely said a word the entire ride, because his heart was somewhere near his throat and he was just trying to get to the water before the light was gone.

He almost never cries. He has cried like that exactly twice in his entire life, and both other times were on his mission. When his knee hit the ground the tears just came. She was crying before he finished the question. She said yes.

They took pictures with the ring on her finger. They stood there in the last light with nothing but the water and the sound of whatever Florida sounds like at dusk, nobody else around, exactly the way Tommy wanted it. Intimate. Private. Just theirs.

And then she noticed her pants were wet.

The tide had come in while they were standing there too happy to notice anything. The blanket was completely submerged. His camera backpack was wet. They were standing in six to eight inches of water. They had been out there for hours and had been so caught up in each other that the entire Atlantic Ocean had snuck up around them.

She walked inside to his family and stood there awkwardly with a rock on her finger while his family acted normal, and then someone noticed, and everyone erupted, and she was laughing and crying and disbelieving in equal measure. She kept asking, is this real? She kept asking it for the rest of the trip, every thirty seconds, glancing down at her hand.

What They Found in Each Other

Tommy says she is the mellowest, happiest person he has ever been around, and that this is exactly what he needs. He is always going. She keeps him grounded. She does not impose her preferences loudly, but when she has a real opinion she says it and she is right. He trusts that. He calls the shots on most small things but knows that when she speaks up about something important, he should listen.

She says he brings something out in her she did not know was there. She is shy around new people. She is reserved in new situations. And he somehow, quietly, without making a production of it, has drawn her out. Made her more willing to put herself out there. Made the world feel a little less like something to be cautious of.

They have never had an argument. Not one. They bicker the way people who love each other do, joking and giving each other a hard time, but they have developed one rule between them. When one of them says I promise, everything stops. No more messing around. I promise means it is real.

They are both bewildered, in a good way, at how perfectly their families fit together. Same values. Same model of what a family looks like. Father as provider and protector. Mother as nurturer and heartbeat of the home. Both families are gospel-centered and hardworking and big. Both families feel easy and familiar to the other. Both Tommy’s parents and Markynn’s parents look at this relationship and say of course. This makes sense. Just follow the blueprint.

Her dad, when Tommy came to ask for his daughter, mentioned this, among a few other things. The Africa connection. The way so many small, improbable details had lined up. He said, there are just so many little things that fit too perfectly. It’s more than coincidence to me.

Before the Altar

They are getting married on May 9th. In a Temple. In the sealing room where Markynn says she has already stood and looked at the altar and thought, that will be us. She has gone to the temple with Tommy’s family on their monthly trips, watching his nephew, waiting, and Tommy has told her that every time he walks through on his own he stops by the sealing room and just stands there thinking about her. About them. About that day.

She is not particularly stressed about the flowers on the tables. She is not consumed by the logistics, even though she is, the way anyone is, a little anxious about the details. But when she stops and reminds herself what the day actually is, the anxiety falls away. The day is just them getting married. That is the whole thing.

Tommy says what he is most excited for video to capture is the emotions. He says he knows he is going to cry. He says he rarely cries and he has already fully accepted that he is going to cry. He does not want to remember just the events of the day. He wants to remember how it felt. He wants to be able to look at the footage in ten years and see his own face and know what was in it.

Markynn wants the little moments. Not just the announced ones. The quiet ones. She wants the first dance captured not just for what it is but for what she imagines looking out from it, seeing everyone who loves them gathered in one room. She wants the small, easy-to-miss things that memory fades first.

The Last Thing He Said to Her, on Camera

At the end of the night, after both interviews, they sat together and were asked to say something to each other that would mean nothing to anyone else in the world but would mean everything to the other person.

Tommy thought for a moment. Not a long moment.

She started crying before he finished.

He has told her this before. He has said it the way some people say I love you, not as a declaration to be made once but as a truth to be named again and again because it is the most real thing he knows. His patriarchal blessing, given years before he met her, described the woman who would be beside him. And in Markynn, in her hard work and her gentleness and her laugh and her willingness to catch frogs in the dark and throw hay bales in the field and rip her nails off on a boat and stumble through the mud of a Florida shoreline with her ring on her hand and still be laughing, he sees exactly who was described.

He has been certain of this since before he could explain it. She became his certainty before he had the words for it.

On May 9th, he gets to say it in a building made of stone and light, across an altar, for keeps.